John,
certainly not having binary compatibility of serialized Templates objects
from one release to another would make Xalan development much easier. If
things had to be binary compatible from release to release then the inner
workings of the Templates (and things they directly or indirectly reference
in the graph of objects that would get serialized) would be fixed, and
development could grind to a halt because the inner workings of a class
(even private fields) could not change.
You are correct that writeObject and readObject and a few other things
could be done to make binary compatibility "better" but I don't think that
all problems can be overcome with this, and this is potentially quite a bit
of work. It isn't enough to check that one can serializer one version,
de-serialize with another, it needs to actually work. Isn't most of benefit
here serializing/de-serializing with that same version of Xalan? If binary
compatibility was free to break between releases (like Java Swing) then we
wouldn't even need to write writeObject/readObject methods.
I'm curious to know the business scenario where an EJB has a reference to a
Templates object that needs to be serialized. If one uses XSLT to generate
HTML from XML then that is presentation information and should be done in a
servlet, not in an EJB. Entity EJBs are for hardened objects that you
don't want to loose (like a banking transaction), so I can't imagine an
entity bean having a Templates object. Stateless EJBs are basically are
there just to run other beans (like take money out of one account, an
entity bean, and put it into another) but provide an environment for
atomicity (all or nothing) and other robustness. I don't think that
stateless beans are passivated or activated.
The only thing left are stateful session beans. A stateful session bean
would hold a customers state from one use of the site to another. Are these
are the ones that I think you are writing about with regards to passivation
and activation. These sort of beans hold things like your shopping cart of
things that you haven't quite purchased yet. I presume that your stateful
EJBs are not generating HTML, but some other business logic? Perhaps
transforming XML into other XML for business communcation? I'm just trying
to understand the scenario where an EJB passivates a Template as part of
its state.
Regards,
----------
Brian Minchau
XSLT Development, IBM Toronto
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
