Mark Little wrote:
Could you outline the pros and cons of the current approaches we have in AS5/AS6? I know we've discussed them elsewhere already, but it would be good to capture it all here. For instance, why you believe that IIOP isn't right.
When it comes around to transaction control for the native invocation layer, as far as I am aware AS 5/6 only has the ClientUserTransaction approach (basically equivalent to "solution 1"). This is fine as far as it goes, but as I have said previously, integrating this at a server level is problematic.
The cons of the AS5/6 native approach are obvious: no transaction propagation, limited transaction control. And the problems in the existing transport implementation are well-known.
As far as IIOP goes, I don't believe that it's "not right" per se; I do believe that there are valid use cases which make IIOP (in general) less than opimal, for example in the case where network topology or security environment makes it undesirable (either in terms of security, performance, configurability, etc.; for example to run many different protocols across a single physical connection or to use OTP-style authentication). CORBA is complex no matter how you slice it, sometimes prohibitively so. But that's my opinion which is really irrelevant here; as I said if we decide as an organization (via the proper channels) to completely ditch the native transport in favor of a full investment in CORBA/IIOP then I will do so happily (I definitely have a lot of other stuff to be working on), though I do personally believe that in this case that we would be passing up the opportunity to make something really special which perfectly fits a real need.
The IIOP question is really about distributed object relationships versus client/server hierarchical relationships. This is an old ideological debate of the absolute worst kind which I will not be a part of, apart from saying that I see the merit of both architectures and believe we should support both.