104.

  

The Service Proxy

A service will be delivered from out of a service provider. That is, a server will be started to act as a service provider. It will create one or more objects, which between them will implement the service. Amongst these will be a distinguished object ”the service object. The service provider will register the service object with service locators and then will wait for network requests to come in for the service. What the service provider will actually export as a service object is usually a proxy for the service. The proxy is an object that will eventually run in a client and will usually make calls back across the network to service backend objects. These backend objects running within the server actually complete the implementation of the service.

The proxy and the service backend objects are tightly integrated; they must communicate using a protocol known to them both, and they must exchange information in an agreed upon manner. However, the relative size of each is up to the designer of a service and its proxy. For example, the proxy may be "fat" (or "smart"), which means it does a lot of processing on the client side. Backend object(s) within the service provider are then typically "thin," not doing much at all. Alternatively, the proxy may be "thin," doing little more (or nothing more) than passing requests between the client and "fat" backend objects, and most processing will be done by the backend objects running in the service provider.

As well as this choice of size, there is also a choice of communication mechanisms between the client and service provider objects. Client/server systems often have the choice of message-based or remote procedure call (RPC) communications. These choices are also available between a Jini proxy and its service. Since they are both in Java, there is a standard RPC-like mechanism called RMI (Remote Method Invocation), and this can be used if wanted. There is no need to use this, but many implementations of Jini proxies will do so because it is easy. RMI does force a particular choice of thin proxy to fat service backend, though, and this may not be ideal for all situations.

This chapter will look at one possibility only, where the proxy is fat and is the whole of the service implementation (the service backend is an empty set of objects). This is the simplest way of implementing the file-classifier service, but not always the most desirable. Chapter 9 will look in more detail at the other possibilities.