I want to connect to XYZ should I use JCA?

JCA is the current standard for connecting to legacy systems. It is typically used when you have one of the following requirements:

1. You need the work done in a legacy system to be part of the same transaction as your ejbs/servlets

2. You want to pass/configure security information from the J2EE server to the legacy system.

3. You need pooling. I mean do you really need it? Is the communication expensive, i.e. stateful.

4. You absolutely have to have a container-independent deployment mechanism.

If you have none of the above requirements you will probably find an MBean is easier to code than a ResourceAdapter. MBeans do not suffer from the restrictions of J2EE session and entity beans; they can load native classes, talk over RMI, advertise resources via JNDI, etc. However, unlike JCA 'rar' files, there is no standard deployment mechanism for deploying an MBean.

Related

• Sun samples

• TSS article

• Chapter about JCA from a book by Sun

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