New Considerations in J2EE Design

The J2EE 1.2 specification offered simple choices. EJBs had remote interfaces and could be used only in distributed applications. Remote Method Invocation (RMI) (over JRMP or IIOP) was the only choice for supporting remote clients.

Since then, two developments - one within J2EE and the other outside - have had profound implications for J2EE design:

  • The EJB 2.0 specification allows EJBs to have local interfaces, in addition to or instead of, remote interfaces. EJBs can be invoked through their local interfaces by components in an integrated J2EE application running in same JVM: for example, components of a web application.

  • The emergence of the XML-based Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) as a widely accepted, platform-agnostic standard for RMI, and widespread support for web services.

EJB 2.0 local interfaces were introduced largely to address serious performance problems with EJB 1.1 entity beans. They were a last-minute addition, after the specification committee had failed to agree on the introduction of "dependent objects" to improve entity bean performance. However, local interfaces have implications reaching far beyond entity beans. We now have a choice whether to use EJB without adopting RMI semantics.

While some of the bolder claims for web services, such as automatic discovery of services through registries, are yet to prove commercially viable, SOAP has already proven its worth for remote procedure calls. SOAP support is built into Microsoft's .NET, J2EE's leading rival, and may supersede platform-specific remoting protocols. The emergence of web services challenges traditional J2EE assumptions about distributed applications.

One of the most important enhancements in the next release of the J2EE specifications will be the integration of standard web services support. However, several excellent, easy-to-use, Java toolsets allow J2EE 1.3 applications to implement and access web services. See, for example, Sun's Java Web Services Developer Pack (http://java.sun.com/webservices/webservicespack.html) and the Apache Axis SOAP implementation (http://xml.apache.org/axis/index.html).

Important 

With EJB local interfaces and web services, we can now use EJB without RMI, and support remote clients without EJB. This gives us much greater freedom in designing J2EE applications.



Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 On Demand
ISBN: B0085SG5O4
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 183

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