Enterprise Object Broker (EOB), AltRMI and Axis

[Paul Hammant <ha...@apache.org>]

Folks,

My last posting here was October, but I've been lurking ever since and 
am very pleased to see continued and rapid progress. A great job.

*Synopsis*

I am interested in SOAP enabling 'Enterprise Object Broker'. As I am an 
Apache committer I am interested in reusing Apache solutions.  See 
http://eob.sourceforge.net/ for EOB.
Axis looks like I could use it bean-like in another project to 
web-service enable dynamically loaded beans. I'm here to query the 
thoughts of those who know about Axis.

*Context*

Just before Xmas I had the itch to (with others) start an "alternative 
to RMI" project.  It is pitched firmly as a Java to Java solution, but 
given that it was in part inspired by the often mention Glue, it has 
SOAP compatibility in its TODO list.  AltRMI is hosted at Jakarta in 
commons -> http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs/jakarta-commons-sandbox/altrmi/  

Having reached a certain level of maturity with that, we started a 
project at SourceForge (Apache license) called Enterprise Object Broker 
(EOB) that reuses AltRMI with the idea to make an application server 
with a lot less restrictions that the J2EE spec forces on people.  We 
have it built to a level where there are six demonstration client/server 
apps working quite well.  As a Java<-->Java solution it does the job and 
illustrates the transparency of implementation location (controvercial 
we know) admirably.  We'd like to be able to, in a manifest, specify the 
publishing type beyond those that are possible with AltRMI.  Here is an 
example application.xml manifest:

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
   <application-info>
      <publish-info type="SocketCustomStream" bind-to="127.0.0.1" 
port="7129"/>
   </application-info>

It might be nice if we could do the following illustrating SOAP as well 
as AltRMI publishing.

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
   <application-info>
      <publish-info type="SocketCustomStream" bind-to="127.0.0.1" 
port="7129"/>
      <publish-info type="Axis" xxx="xxx" yyy="yyy" />
   </application-info>

Now, I have the latest Axis from CVS, and have poked thru the source and 
built some targets and it all looks good especially the .jws stuff.

Our bean manifests (beans.xml) are like this below (an application can 
have many beans).
  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <beans-info>
    <bean-info name="Clock"
        facade="net.sourceforge.eob.examples.example4.Clock"
        impl="net.sourceforge.eob.examples.example4.ClockImpl">
    </bean-info>
  </beans-info>

The publishing for them is entirely dyamic (no ejbc step).  The lookup 
name will be 'Clock' and the interfaces that is castable on the client 
side is 'net.sourceforge.eob.examples.example4.Clock'. We might have 
made some mistakes with naming (e.g. facade="...") but it is very simple 
and quite transparent.  We invoke javac like you folks do.  We are a 
little uncomfortable about this given it is slow and deprecated, I guess 
you are too.

If we want to similarly publish using Axis, we need obviously a servlet 
capable web server (we have one - Jo!).  

*Questions*

1) To what extent can Axis be instantiated and fed configuration to make 
publishing over SOAP entirely dynamic?

2) Does everything have to be in the same classloader for Axis to work 
well?  ( we have a complex class loader tree for beans ).

Regards,

- Paul H