[Springframework-developer] application integration: intra-VM remoting

[Steven D. <ste...@gm...>]

Hi,

Consider an organization that has a number of applications each using
Spring. Each application is deployed as a separate war in the same
servlet container.

An application can expose specific services which allow integration
with other applications. Messaging is one solution for integration but
if you can use global transactions direct method calls in the same
thread is also a suitable integration pattern.

I don't want to re-configure the service beans belonging to one
application plus all its dependencies in each application that wants
to call said application. Instead I want to do a call through a client
library EJB style. Using Spring each application could provide the
persistent classes, interfaces of exposed services and a Spring config
file with a client setup to access these services. The service than
would live in one place: the servlet context of the application it
belongs to.

But I don't want to use the remoting strategies currently included
with Spring: HTTP invoker, Hessian, Burlap, RMI. For a number of
reasons this is not suitable:

- communication overhead in creating connections and serialization
while in the same VM.
- calls do not happen in the same thread -> no global transactions.

So all I can think of is to do remoting through an intra-VM mechanism.
I haven't got a clue on how to set up such a mechanism but I know it's
a typical use case for EJB applications (local home interfaces).

Steven