The company I work for is rearchitecting operator workstations for a
legacy telephony application.
The legacy workstation still runs on MS-DOS(!) and communicates with a
legacy backend, both client and server written in C. The "interface"
such as it is, is a bunch of C header files. Data is passed by datagram
between client and server and the headers are needed on both sides to
make sense of the data. Since none of the people who developed this 20
years ago will be around, maintenance is a nightmare.
Probably because of its origins in a pre-multithreading universe, this
system was developed using primarily asynchronous methods. Client sends
a datagram to server, makes no attempt to wait for a return. Server
periodically sends "synchronization" messages to client (sometimes
triggered by the results of methods invoked by the datagrams from the
client). These synchronization methods are also by datagram.
Since the server-side is NOT going to be totally rewritten. and must,
after the rewrite, continue to support the old operator workstations as
well as the new ones, the scheme I am thinking of is as follows:
1). add an Apache Web Server to the server and a CXF wrapper around the
existing server functionality.
2) rewrite the Client as a java swing application that encompasses a CXF
client.
3) each operation now initiated from the client will be an asynchronous
Web Service call. These calls would be one-way
4) to handle the synchronization requirement mentioned above, I am
envisioning a separate thread in the client that makes an asynchronous
"RegisterForSynchMessages()" call to the server. This would be polled
continually and would expect REPEATED messages through this channel.
That is, the server side handler for this call must continue to run even
after it sends a response. It will never complete and must continue to
send such responses back through the channel.
Is this achievable using CXF's asynchronous support?
