12.3.4. Remote Access to EJBs

12.3.4.1. About Remote Method Access

JBoss Remoting is the framework which provides remote access to EJBs, JMX MBeans, and other similar services. It works within the following transport types, with or without SSL:

Supported Transport Types

  • Socket / Secure Socket
  • RMI / RMI over SSL
  • HTTP / HTTPS
  • Servlet / Secure Servlet
  • Bisocket / Secure Bisocket
JBoss Remoting also provides automatic discovery via Multicast or JNDI.
It is used by many of the subsystems within JBoss EAP 6, and also enables you to design, implement, and deploy services that can be remotely invoked by clients over several different transport mechanisms. It also allows you to access existing services in JBoss EAP 6.
Data Marshalling

The Remoting system also provides data marshalling and unmarshalling services. Data marshalling refers to the ability to safely move data across network and platform boundaries, so that a separate system can perform work on it. The work is then sent back to the original system and behaves as though it were handled locally.

Architecture Overview

When you design a client application which uses Remoting, you direct your application to communicate with the server by configuring it to use a special type of resource locator called an InvokerLocator, which is a simple String with a URL-type format. The server listens for requests for remote resources on a connector, which is configured as part of the remoting subsystem. The connector hands the request off to a configured ServerInvocationHandler. Each ServerInvocationHandler implements a method invoke(InvocationRequest), which knows how to handle the request.

The JBoss Remoting framework contains three layers that mirror each other on the client and server side.

JBoss Remoting Framework Layers

  • The user interacts with the outer layer. On the client side, the outer layer is the Client class, which sends invocation requests. On the server side, it is the InvocationHandler, which is implemented by the user and receives invocation requests.
  • The transport is controlled by the invoker layer.
  • The lowest layer contains the marshaller and unmarshaller, which convert data formats to wire formats.