[jboss-as7-dev] Serving the Admin Console

[Jason T. Greene]

On 1/11/11 5:22 AM, Heiko Braun wrote:
> If the DomainController (HostController) serves the REST API, the
> question would be how wan't to build it.
> I would propose RestEasy+TJWS [1]. TJWS has very small footprint, but
> still supports the Servlet API.
> In that case we would buy a suitable runtime for serving the admin
> console. It could integrate through the REST API.
> (or even GWT-RPC if we go that way)
 > If you skip RESTeasy, fleshing out the REST API becomes more work,but
 > it would reduce the dependencies.

I think its important to conceptually separate the console from the REST 
API server. The main reason is to keep the DC process complexity 
somewhat constrained, so that it's less likely to fail, it limits the 
amount of updates needed, and manages overhead.

*IF* we end up with a very lightweight console (at least from the server 
requirements), then it might make sense to collocate it in the DC. If 
not then we can use the console as a subsystem of a server that acts as 
a client to the DC.

No matter the technology choice for the REST API service, we will need 
to implement a detyped <-> json marshalling component, but this should 
be pretty simple. I suspect most of the time won't be the 
implementation, but rather deciding high-level protocol details (how URL 
mapping will work, and how REST-pure we want to be*).

[*] Note that we have already decided to bend the REST rules by doing 
updates over JSON POSTs (which is really RPCish). However, this is the 
only real practical way to solve the problem without having to write 
REST conversion code for each and every operation we support.

-- 
Jason T. Greene
JBoss, a division of Red Hat