Architecture consideration

[Yuhichi Nakamura <NA...@jp.ibm.com>]

Food for thoughts:

So far, we have assumed a "single" AxisEngine architecure.
(I prefere the term "AxisEngine" than "AxisServer."
As I mentioned in the security thread, having multiple engines could
be a good idea.  What prevents multiple engine approach?
In the current codebase, multiple engines can be generated when
multiple instances of AxisServlet are generated.  Am I right?

many:1 relationship between AxisServlet and AxisEngine.
An AxisServlet is associated to an AxisEngine.  An AxisEngine
might be associated by multiple AxisServlet's.  This
indicates that AxisServlet does not perform routing.

In addtion to AxisServlet, we should want to provide
other transport listners such as SMTP, JMS, FTP, etc.
Furthermore, some AxisEngine instance might be shared by
these listners.  In that case, AxisEngine should be
put in a different JVM, and accessed by others remotely.
I prefer to provide AxisEngine EJB, and access it via RMI/IIOP.
This allows us to use J2EE security model (role-based
authorization).

I believe that the above ideas are just an extension (hopefully natural)
of our current thoughts.  Any comments?

I think J2EE is the next big thing, so I want to consider how Axis
fits into J2EE.

Best regards,

Yuhichi Nakamura
IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory
Tel: +81-462-73-4668