j2ee work with clients other than java app!!!!
hi:
i am working on a project which consists of a portal and others about enterprise workflow.
we decide to work with three tires architecture and j2ee seems to be a good choice. But there's
a lot of workflows we must work with client other than web browser(such as printing ). And
java application is not a good choice for it's harder to code and use.
so it seems that we have to choose vb, dephi etc clients, but we still wanna work with three
tire architecture and all the logic reside on the j2ee server. but theres no way to call ejb from
vb clients (rmi not suported).
so we have to add another tier on the server side -corba server, but i am doubt about this
and it makes our application more complex.
is there any other solution such as web service ( soap protocol ) or other solutions?
regards
[918 byte] By [
javagirl3] at [2007-9-27 1:20:24]
I think you can have
1. a java client (java application / applet ) for the j2ee app server thru http / RMI/ SOAP
2. a non-java client, with com-corba bridge for that j2ee app server. http/ IIOP/ SOAP
both these clients would be able to communicate with the j2ee server.
i have two questions about your solutions:
1. java client need more resources than other clients such as vb ,dephi. And it's not so powerful
with regards to vb when works as just presentation logic.
2. i never worked with com - corba bridge and i am not sure whether it's as stable as we need.
soap protocol and corba seems to be two solutions to choose from when choose non-java clients.
but we have decided to work as j2ee as the server side solution, in comparation with java clients
we have to add another tier to transform data to and from soap and add more risk and decrease performance . And when java client , we can call
ejbs directly .
it's really hard to choose and we have to test a lot before make any decison .
thanks !
There are many solutions. SOAP is one solution, but the application will get way more complex than it should. Unless you have expert SOAP developers in your team, I would disband the idea.
Here are some of the other workarounds.
1) From your VB screen, invoke a URL. There are a number of ActiveX controls that can do this. Pass the data to this URL as request parameters. For example http://www.domain.com/ActionServlet?Context=SaveEmployee&Name=JavaGirl3Age=25Skills=VB,Java
You will implement a servlet called ActionServlet that can interpret the Context. Multiple parameters will have to be passed as a delimited string, say comma delimited. You could also send out the parameter as an XML String
2) Another variation is to use a Browser ActiveX Control available in VB. The user can enter the data in the control. The page itself can be generated through JSP & J2EE framework, but runs within a VB app.
3) There are other solutions too. Weblogic 7.0 has a VB-Java interface for interacting with EJB and J2EE components. Check that out.
4) Look at the .Net Web Services features. VB 7.0 along with Web Services can be used to talk with J2EE.
Just like VB and Java can interact, Java can interact with VB too. Maybe you should explore that possiblity too.
Finally my advice: Try as far as possible to avoid this VB-Java combination. . I was an expert VB developer for many years before mastering Java. If you want to use VB use the .Net features. Otherwise go Java all the way. All User interface requirements can be satisfied using the J2EE architecture. You can print any page by bringing out PDF documents or by producing a Printable Page, or even writing a COM Component that can read the data and print using VB api. Excellent user interfaces, even better than VB can be created using JSP along with CSS and DHTML.
Regards, Venky
