RE: [Springframework-developer] Spring remoting with Jini?

[Ben P. <Ben...@pe...>]

Seth said:

>As an avid Jini fan (and past user) I can say it should be a great
>match, and quite easy to do.  I'd be glad to help if you need it.=20
>I've often thought about combining Spring and Jini, so I'm glad you
>brought it up. :)

It's nice to know that others have also considered this.  Perhaps I can
get your thoughts on what I've contemplated thus far:

The current implementations of remoting seem to follow a common model of
intercepting method invocations at the client end and turning them into
remote service calls.  To follow this model with Jini implies that you
load a Jini Configuration at some initialisation point, discover the
service, grab the service proxy, then invoke the intercepted
MethodInvocation on it.  I'm a little shaky on the Spring stuff... but I
guess you'd have a JiniProxyFactoryBean to do some initialisation in
afterPropertiesSet (I imagine you'd set up a LookupCache for the service
interface in question?).

On the remote end, I'm even more uncertain.  I like to think of Jini in
terms of Rio (a sub-project that makes Jini more accessible to those of
us in the enterprise application space), as I came upon the two
simultaneously.  So, you would have a Cybernode 'container' (which is
itself a service) that can export services as provisioned to it by a
Provision Monitor.  The question in my mind is where Spring comes into
the picture.  I see no reason why one couldn't have a JiniRemoteExporter
of sorts... such that when Spring initialises the bean, the service
interface is exported... however in the case of Rio, it's actually when
a service is provisioned to a Cybernode that it's exported. =20

So, within a Cybernode container (or any JVM), I may want to load a
Spring ApplicationContext, but I might not necessarily want that to
drive the exporting of services... and that's certainly configurable
(but you probably wouldn't want to be providing a service within the
Cybernode container without the Cybernode service itself knowing that
it's exported it).

The context in which I'm looking at this is that a couple of colleagues
are piloting a fully Spring managed architecture for a web application,
from MVC to integration with Hibernate, transaction management and all
that.  What we're just starting to look at now is physically (or
logically) breaking up the web and application tiers with remoting, for
which Jini seems an excellent middleware fit, particularly given other
requirements that we have.

I'd be very keen to receive any comments and ideas that you might have.


Abel said:

>Ben I'm currently working on JavaSpaces and Spring integration (as a
side >project) nothing related to remote invocations though.  What I'm
doing is >putting together something that resembles the JMS stuff in
Spring but for >JavaSpaces.  The goal is to make the Jini related stuff
transparent from >the user.

So by 'JMS stuff' I take it you mean the org.springframework.jms
package? Have you been compiling any core support classes for general
Jini operations, e.g. service discovery/lookup, configuration
management, etc.? It'd be great to have a common integration point with
Spring for the core Jini stuff, and use that as a platform for
JavaSpaces, remoting, and whatever else.  At the moment I'm trying to
write some fairly case-specific Jini remoting stuff to prove to myself
that I'm not barking up the wrong tree, but I'm not yet comfortable
enough with Jini and Spring to be sure what the best way forward is.  I
have a good application for it though, so I hope to make some progress.
I'm also interested in JavaSpaces integration for areas outside of
remote service invocation, although it's not something I'm focusing on
right now.   =20