[Spread-users] Request/response Java API

Daniel L. Rall dlr at finemaltcoding.com
Sun Oct 5 19:32:24 EDT 2003


Ben Bernhard wrote:
> We might divide the problem into a few parts:
> - Marshalling/unmarshalling the Java request/response into/from a wire
> format.

I've been interested doing this for some time now, and like SOAP with a gzip 
content encoding for implementation.  SOAP messages are bloddy bloated, so I 
see compression (which will be extremely effective given the redundancies in 
the XML message formatting) at a must have.

> - Synchronous blocking for a response and request/response correlation

Hooking in a servlet engine (e.g. Catalina from the ASF's Tomcat) gives you 
this for free.

> - Server-side implementation registration and the associated dispatching
> code.

I take it that this piece sits between SOAP and the servlet engine?  Each 
dispatcher could even be implemented as a pure servlet, but something less 
implementation platform specific might be more desirable.  For instance, I 
might like to write my dispatchers in Python.

> I don't need distributed objects, just remote method calls. That means I
> don't need object references, instance registration/lookup, or garbage
> collection.
 >
> Preferably, the implementation would not be Java specific. In other
> words, the wire format should be something a c++ application could parse
> (not serialized objects for example).

For sure!  Which is why SOAP strikes me as a good implementation tool.

> It certainly looks like I can implement my needs over Spread. I'm aware
> of partial solutions I could start with (SOAP for marshalling, etc), but
> if somebody has a complete Spread implementation at hand, it would save
> me some time. 

I'm not aware of any packages which meet all your criteria, but am soon going 
to need one myself.  Ben, are you planning on pursuing implementation of these 
ideas?

- Dan





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