[SoapRMI] newbie: CORBA -> XSOAP

[Aleksander Slominski]

Randy Heiland wrote:

> I have a client-server (visualization) app that uses CORBA for communication
> and am curious about swapping out CORBA for XSOAP.

hi,

what are the reasons that you wan to make this change?

definitely performance of CORBA can not be matched by SOAP (it was not designed for
performance and XML does not help here - for small messages it may be good enough
but binary data is typically good).

> Essentially my requirements
> are:
>
>  - a Linux factory server (currently a C++ CORBA servant)
>     - capable of forking off a server per client (or something analogous)

XSOAP can work with familiar RMI model so you do not need to anything but use
UnicastRemoteObject

>  - a Java Swing client (using 1.3.1)
>  - ability to return binary (compressed image) data

this may be a problem as XSOAP has no support for attachments however you can
BASE64 encode your data and send it as string, trade-offs: 33% increase in size and
overhead of encoding / decoding but it is easy to put into XML.

> One question:  am I required to run a web server to do the XSOAP stuff?

when you call UnicastRemoteObject.exportObject() it uses small embedded web server
to handle HTTP communication. however you can also embed your object inside servlet
and then servlet container talk to web server to handle HTTP.

> Any suggestions, or pointers to examples in the downloaded pkg would be
> welcome!

if you already has CORBA code you may just try to export your object as web
services with XSOAP and access them using XSOAP dynamic proxy mechanism in Java (no
need to generate stubs). the current version is available at our web page.

thanks,

alek

ps. it is possible to handle encoding/decoding of byte[] into BASE64 transparently
and i actually worked on such plugin for XSOAP but have not enough time ot finish
it yet ...