ICE and EJBs

[kwaclaw]

I am currently tasked to make suggestions for a web application architecture blueprint. I am very much interested in suggesting ICE as the underlying cross-platform communication infrastructure for the application part, as I would like to the ability to expose some app functions/services in a cross-platform way.

However, I am running into some difficulty. There seems to be some preference here for running apps under an application server like JBOSS. This means they have to be in Java (no problem yet), but it also means the runtime environment is an EJB container, and right out of the box the EJB spec only supports IIOP for EJBs.

I know, ICE (the core) mainly brings three parts to the table:
1) A wire protocol
2) IDL and several IDL-to-Language mappings
3) An execution/runtime environment for ICE objects

It is the third that is the problem, as EJBs require their own kind of runtime environment. My question is:

Is it possible to expose an EJB through ICE (wire protocol) - while it is running in an EJB container (as it can be done with IIOP)?

Karl

[bernard]

Hi Karl,

I think what you're asking about is the ability to call your EJBs from Ice clients, the Ice equivalent of JBoss IIOP.

In theory, this should be feasible. I suspect this would require a RMI-to-Ice mapping, and also specific support in your favorite EJB container. Quite a bit of work Naturally we'd be delighted to see such addition to JBoss.

Cheers,
Bernard

[kwaclaw]

Originally Posted by bernard

I think what you're asking about is the ability to call your EJBs from Ice clients, the Ice equivalent of JBoss IIOP.

Yes, correct.

Originally Posted by bernard

In theory, this should be feasible. I suspect this would require a RMI-to-Ice mapping, and also specific support in your favorite EJB container. Quite a bit of work Naturally we'd be delighted to see such addition to JBoss.

Me too.

Anyway, I guess all I can suggest is writing an ICE adapter as EJB client.
Its just more work than the other choices. E. g., a web service can be exposed from an EJB simply through annotation.

Karl