On Wednesday, March 13, 2002, at 11:02 AM, James Bates wrote:
I have used what's currently in org.apache.xindice.client.corba as an insipration for the API that needs to be exposed over the
network, and built a first draft of an RPC-able version of it.
I've merged CollectionManagerServant and CollectionServant functionality, but they could be separated again if wanted.
I haven't thought deeply about the separation between simple and internal API's yet, as discussed earlier. I wanted to first
get something that is as close as possible to the current corba API's...
In my opinion this should definitely not be a design goal. There is no legacy to worry about. I'm going to rewrite the XML:DB API and I don't care one bit how much this new API looks like the old API. Beyond that I don't think anyone uses the CORBA API for anything. Obviously we need to keep the basic functionality, but beyond that it doesn't need to look anything like the CORBA API structurally.
The most important change is the CollectionHandle class, which is meant to be serializable, and thus can be used to let clients designate particular collections, thus emulating "remote object" behaviour.
This should not be a design goal either. Keep it simple, simple, simple! : -)
The server-side implementation of CollectionService would have to keep a hashtable probably to map these handles to real collections.
We really should avoid any kind of server side state. That is one of the very major problems with CORBA overall and one of the biggest appeals of going to a stateless protocol. I actually started reworking the CORBA API at one point to make it stateless, but that is such a major PITA in CORBA I shelved it. In HTTP based protocols you get that by default, let's not ruin it. :-)
This is just a start and possible a ground for some further discussion. I'
m going to start making a server-side implementation of the API and a new org.apache.xindice.server.Service that starts up an XML-RPC server to expose the API.
The code is in package org.apache.xindice.client.rpc, in analogy with the current CORBA servants. It is quite unrelated to the rest of the codebase (for the moment), so it shouldn't interfere with the existing build process.
Probably shouldn't commit things like this. Just post them somewhere where we can look at them to discuss. Also I haven't tagged the tree yet so the trunk is still closed to new additions. I'll post when it's open and what the tags are for the 1.0 tree. I'll take care of this today, in the process I'm going to need to remove this code.
James
Kimbro Staken - http://www.kstaken.org - http://www.xmldatabases.org Apache Xindice native XML database http://xml.apache.org/xindice XML:DB Initiative http://www.xmldb.org Senior Technologist (Your company name here)
