[JBoss-user] Multiple Servers - Bean Locating

[James C. <ji...@in...>]

I'm trying to get a handle on how jBoss can be used to distribute an
application. In development (and sometimes in production) all of the beans
that an application needs may not be located in the same container. How can
a bean in one container talk to a bean in another container? I could not
find anything in the docs that explained this very well.

Solution #1
===========
I saw a newsgroup message where the author was relating a technique for
using the <ejb-link> tag in the jboss.xml file to include a url like:
jndi://host:port/path/to/object, or something like that. If this works,
good, but it significantly impacts the deployment process if every bean is
hardcoded, although it is via deployment descriptors.

Solution #2
===========
I was thinking I could run only one of the jBoss servers with a naming
service. The other servers would be configured to use the name service of
the first container. Whenever a client or another EJB needed a reference to
a bean they would *all* look it up in the same location.

Solution #3
===========
I read in the docs about the possibility of federating namespaces. Each
server's name service could be federated into one name service that clients
and jBoss containers would use for lookup.

So what is possible to achieve this today? Are some other more robust
solutions waiting for the clustering architecture to work its way out? Where
are the ideas for future direction discussed or documented?

thanks,
jim