EJB - Send Data to remote

Question

I want to exchange data between two applications JEE6/JSF2.0 and i'm looking for the best solution. I thought of the below solutions :

• by using a JSON file.
• by using XML file.
• by using GSON file.
• by using Remote interface (EJB 3.0).

For you, what's the best solution to use ?

edit : This two applications will be always running on the same network (but can not be on the same JVM)

Answer 1

I want to provide an alternative to David's answer, as I feel that there are some drawbacks to RMI that he underplayed.

1. This is a Java specific technology. If a third server needs to be introduced and it is a Microsoft Reporting Services server for example, then it cannot talk in the same language.

2. RMI is an OLD technology and doesn't particularly look well on a CV. Web services are the future. Experienced RMI developers are more uncommon than experienced web service developers.

3. Cumbersome and heavy framework

A better solution in my opinion would be to use SOAP XML based web services. Here are some advantages to this approach:

1. Universal acceptance in nearly any development framework. No matter the technology, nearly all have helpful libraries for interacting with web services.

2. Java has good support for object serialization into XML. This means objects can be quickly serialized into a SOAP XML request, sent to the other server, and deserialized back into a Java object by the other application server for processing.

3. A service layer can give you the decoupling interface between the two applications just as RMI can.

I hope you reconsider the use of SOAP XML based web services in your application.

Answer 2

There's two options really as you yourself stated.

Using RMI to connect to a EJB or using a webservice and communicating by JSON/XML etc...

From my experience RMI can be favorable if your applicaitons are on the same network, if not then you might get problems with firewalls etc and be forced to tunnel the RMI using HTTPS... which pretty much makes the RMI calls webservice calls.

If your on two different machines then webservices are nice as they dont cause as much trouble with firewalls. Also as they use the HTTP protocol you dont have to worry about the data being transfered.

These examples are kinda generalised but should give you some insight.

GSON vs XML vs JSON is a completely different subject... Non is superiour to the other, and all are fairly easily read by the human eye.

UPDATE From what I've understod you wont have to worry about firewalls and such, I would recommend using RMI. It usually results in cleaner code and somewhat better performance.

Answer 3

Since I have seen both in action, I can make a comparison between the two technologies, EJB and WebServices. I can confirm that EJB is way more efficient, has support of transactions (including distributed transactions, if that is your requirement), exception handling, and binary streaming out of the box. In terms of performance EJB may exceed SOAP by a factor of 5 times in speed, and REST for about 3 times.

However, EJB is not an integration technology. In fact, it has never thought to do so. The biggest flaw of EJB is that it is very coupled to the Java Platform. Therefore, both endpoints must be written in Java and should use the same Java EE version.

Another problem is that EJB is not a protocol per se, so the implementations from two containers/vendors is probably different. If you need to access a remote EJB from JBoss AS on an Oracle WebLogic server, you must bring JBoss EJB client implementation with you.

Another big problem related to integration with EJB is a lack of data exchange format. Since it uses Java Serialized objects for communication, the data types must be shared on both ends. If you create a new exception type on the server that is classified as an Application Exception, if the client who consumes this service triggers the exception, his code will break. Note that, in this case the remote API was not violated, but another unknown type was introduced.

And, of course, by depending solely on the class type as an exchange format, you are giving the programmers opportunity for doing very stupid things. If you have many different teams in large projects using EJB as integration technology using different versions of Java EE, prepare yourself to experience uttermost pain. I've seem a programmer including a JPA entity on the client, who was annotated with named queries, the table which was accessing, its columns, etc, essentially giving away all the database layout to the service consumer. But it can get even worse. I've already seem a programmer returning a data structure that belonged to a dependency, namely Eclipselink 1.0. However, if you access this from a JBoss server, Eclipselink is also a JPA implementation technology, which conflicts with JBoss' hibernate. So, now you have to include Eclipselink jar in your JBoss APP classpath and configure the container for not loading JPA related packages, which otherwise will break your application completely. Even so, it can get WORSE than before: some other service you need to connect had also the bright idea of using the same datastructure, but now from Eclipselink 1.1.1, that has a different implementation, but the same class signature. Now you are in a very bad situation.

The bottom line: NEVER, EVER, use EJB as an integration technology. Use SOAP using a contract-first approach, where you define a canonical data model for the application, mapping java datastructures to a XML exchange format that can be used by any client, be it written in any language or using different stacks. Or use REST implementing a resource based, using HATEOAS principles. These days I rarely seem a reason for using EJB at all, since CDI is now on the market, support many features that EJB does and does not include any RPC related technology.