Custom protocol

[Sebastian Götz <s....@inform.ch>]

Hi there,

 

today I stumbled over the following problem:

We are developing a new software platform base on a web-service application
that is targeting tomcat as application server. This I quite easy. No we
have embedded devices not capable of accessing web-services that are driving
a proprietary protocol. Since the endpoint for those devices is the
web-service application as well in the end, I was think about how we could
host this custom protocol inside tomcat cleanly.

 

A quick and dirty approach would be to create a servlet loaded on startup
creating a listening socket on a desired port. Although this would suffice
for the moment it has some drawbacks (we could not make use of the tomcat
infrastructure (connection pooling, thread pooling,…))

 

After some research I found out that one could provide an own implementation
of a tomcat connector (more precisely: of a tomcat protocol handler).

 

In the end my question is: How is this done the best way? At best this would
also work in clustered environments.

 

 

Sincerely

 

Sebastian Götz