Chapter 14. Remoting
The main objective of JBoss Remoting is to provide a single API for most network based invocations and related services that use pluggable transports and data marshallers. The JBoss Remoting API provides the ability for making synchronous and asynchronous remote calls, push and pull callbacks, and automatic discovery of remoting servers. The intention is to allow for the addition of different transports to fit different needs, yet still maintain the same API for making the remote invocations and only requiring configuration changes, not code changes, to fit these different needs.
Out of the box, Remoting supplies multiple transports (bisocket, http, rmi, socket, servlet, and their ssl enabled counterparts), standard and compressing data marshallers, and a configurable facility for switching between standard jdk serialization and JBoss Serialization. It is also capable of remote classloading, has extensive facilities for connection failure notification, performs call by reference optimization for client/server invocations collocated in a single JVM, and implements multihomed servers.
In the Enterprise Application Platform, Remoting supplies the transport layer for the EJB2, EJB3, and Messaging subsystems. In each case, the configuration of Remoting is largely predetermined and fixed, but there are times when it is useful to know how to alter a Remoting configuration.
14.1. Background
A Remoting server consists of a Connector, which wraps and configures a transport specific server invoker. A connector is represented by an InvokerLocator string, such as
socket://bluemonkeydiamond.com:8888/?timeout=10000&serialization=jboss
which indicates that a server using the socket transport is accessible at port 8888 of host bluemonkeydiamond.com, and that the server is configured to use a socket timeout of 10000 and to use JBoss Serialization. A Remoting client can use an InvokerLocator to connect to a given server.
In the Enterprise Application Platform, Remoting servers and clients are created far below the surface and are accessible only through configuration files. Moreover, when a proxy for a SLSB, for example, is downloaded from the JNDI directory, it comes with a copy of the InvokerLocator, so that it knows how to contact the appropriate Remoting server. The important fact to note is that, since the server and its clients share the InvokerLocator, the parameters in the InvokerLocator serve to configure both clients and servers.
