Question

What are the best-practice / industry standard technologies for the folowing requirements

1. Allow transfer of business objects from one client / server to another
2. Language and platform independent
3. Supports Streaming to alow passing large data (e.g. a connected statefull conversation)
4. Is Asynchronous in nature (doesn’t block, allows monitoring progress)

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SOAP workaround

1,2 point on SOAP web services, but 3 and 4 make it a little hard to implement (don’t they?)

I was thinking of the following “hack”, but I both don’t like it, and I’m sure there is a better solution.

To support 3 and 4 the SOAP web service can have methods that pass the data in chunks, e.g.

void startObjTransfer(String objectId);
void addObjChunk(String objectId, ObjData currentChunk);
void endObjTransfer(String objectId);

Where ObjData contains a partial graph of the data, and knowledge of its location in the graph.

to better support 4 a method like this can be used to ask how much progress was made

void getObjTransferProgress(String objectId);

What do you think about the above? isn’t there (hopefully there is) a better one? (even non SOAP)

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RMI / COM / .NET Remoting / DCOM

Not language independed

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CORBA

Well, no.

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REST

Not answering 3 and 4, (SOAP + Buzz?)

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AJAX / COMETD

Related to question: Asynchronous web service streaming

Not sure how this will work, please explain

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Message Queue?

Will that work for this purpose?

Answer 1

I think Coucho Hessian should fulfill your needs (including streaming, platform independence…). You might also take a look Thrift from the Facebook guys.