Is this the right project for a simple socket usecase?

[kaffeetrinker]

Hi there,

i stumbled over iron jacamar while searching for jca, but I'm not very familiar with jcaeither. I have a simple usecase:

The j2ee web project I'm working on needs to connect to a tcp socket, send/receive data and then close it. I could have done this within a singleton bean, but because I have to watch the socket inputstream, I have the need to create a thread for that. That said, I think it is not allowed to create threads within a j2ee container on my own. I also tried to use @Asynchronous for the socket function, but that resulted in multiple concurrence exceptions.

Now that i've read a little bit about jca and iron jacamar, I think maybe this is the right way to implement the socket connection. But for example, I could not find a sample with a while loop over the socket, that would notify my web project in case of an event.

Could you give me some hints what to use? So far I thought of creating an outbound jca (with the help of the eclipse plugin) and send event notifications to the web app via jms queue (because I could not find a sample of how to notify the resource client in case of an event).

Thank you!

[jesper.pedersen]

JCA is correct for your use-case.

See http://www.ironjacamar.org/doc/userguide/1.1/en-US/html/ch01.html#overview for an overview of the architecture. In your case the Socket will be in the ManagedConnection. You can checkout our HelloWorld example at http://www.ironjacamar.org/doc/userguide/1.1/en-US/html/apb.html#sample_helloworld or in the IronJacamar distribution.

And yes, if you need a Thread you will use the WorkManager with your Work implementation.

If you are doing inbound then you will need a MessageEndpoint/MessageEndpointFactory that supports your listener. I would suggest supporting the JMS listener such that you can use the EJB3/MDB container as the MessageEndpoint/MessageEndpointFactory. You could do your own of course. There is an inflow example here: https://github.com/ironjacamar/ironjacamar/blob/master/core/src/test/java/org/jboss/jca/core/inflow/PureInflowTestCase.java

Likely you are looking for something more simple though.

I'm not saying that JCA is the only solution to the problem - you could likely hack something together with Netty - but from a pure EE perspective I would say JCA is the way forward.