What sort of a bean, if any sort of bean, for a custom data

[bmargulies]

I'm trying to determine what the least awful J2EE/EJB pattern is for the following:

I have a large, read-only resource. There should be one in a server. It provides a common service. There is JNI under it, so it has to be in one, common, classloader.

I've successfully deployed it in plain old Tomcat by putting the implementation in the shared classloader and setting up a JNDI name for it via Tomcat's global resource declarations.

In J2EE-land, should this be JCA, or can it be a singleton EJB of some kind?

[milowe]

Why would you put the read-only resource in a EJB container?
The tomcat setup works just fine.

[bmargulies]

The resource has to be accessible to an application that is built as a pile of stateless session beans. They need to query this thing. Adding an extra protocol hop to another server is undesirable.

[milowe]

You dont provide that much background info so I give you a genric solution:
Wrap your service in a MBean.

[jamesstrachan]

Also see this discussion on February 14th. in the design patterns area :-

http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=60216

James

[bmargulies]

Well, I have three questions about mbeans as an approach:

1) Can an MBean have JNI.
2) Can an MBean register a JNDI resource.
3) Can the results be relatively portable to IBM Websphere.

#2 is also asked in the other thread you referenced.