[Springframework-rcp-dev] Service Data Objects

[Andy D. <an...@ma...>]

As mentioned previously, I'm currently developing a rich client.  One of the 
things this rich client must do is present to the user a unified UI that is 
composed of information from various services.  For example, an employee's 
salary might come from the payroll service, while the employee's security 
roles will come from the security service.  To the end user, it is all one 
unified front, while in reality there are many back end services that need to 
be called into and managed.  On top of that, the UI must be dynamic... not 
all users will be allowed to see an employee's salary or their security 
information, in which case I don't need to waste the bandwidth gathering this 
information (anyway, I would get a security exception if I tried).  I'm 
guessing this could be a fairly common issue in rich clients: building a UI 
that is a composite of many POJO DTOs from many different services.  What I 
would like is the ability to dynamically compose "logical objects" at runtime 
that are a composite of actual POJOs from various services.  For example, a 
logical "employee" object might contain a salary field from the payroll 
service, a securityRoles field from the security service, a name field from 
the HR service, and so on.
After digging around a bit, I discovered the Service Data Objects 
specification from IBM+BEA (which has now been made into a JSR).  This 
specification seems to address this very issue.  I'm wondering if it would be 
worth the effort to offer any kind of integration with this spec in the 
spring-rcp project?  Of course the spec is very new and still evolving, but 
when has that ever stopped open source? :-)
More details can be found here:
Original Spec: http://dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/commonj/sdo/index.jsp
JSR 235: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=235
theserverside.com discussion: 
http://theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=22646