[JBoss-user] Sharing EJB/JNDI resources across JBoss instances

[Jason D. <ja...@bo...>]

I am wondering if there is a general way to share EJB and JNDI resources
across multiple JBoss instances.

We currently have a server make up similar to this:

<snip>

 [ client ]
     |
    XMLRPC
       \
 [ HTTP interface ]
         |
        RMI
          \
 [ entity bean server ] --JMS-- [ stage 1 processor ]
          |                              |
        JDBC                            JMS
          |                              |
     * ORACLE *                 [ stage 2 processor ]

</snip>

Everything except for the client (and ORACLE) is running inside of a JBoss
instance.  Currently the stage 1 processor needs to access some resource
from the entity bean server, but also needs to use local session beans to
process work flow.  The state 2 processor is completely isolated from the
database.

So I am wondering what are some clean/elegant ways to allow EJB resource
sharing.  I thought about a JNDI mapper, that would copy the home
objects from the entity server.  But then I would have to deal with
re-connecting when either server is re-booted.  I may end up doing something
like this, but I wanted to filter it through this list first to see if there
is a better way.

Currently we are explicitly constructing a context to the "other" server,
but I don't really care for that.  I would rather let each component make
use of the local naming service and then bridge the names where possible.

Unfortunately there is not much documentation or examples for using EJB in
this fashion... at least not that I could find.  Most of it is aimed at
web-application style usage, where we are building a distributed processing
system.

Any ideas on how to proceed, or pointers to documentation that might be
helpful?

Thanks,

--jason