cmolodo [https://community.jboss.org/people/cmolodo] created the discussion "Re: Using JBoss as back-end for remote thick client?" To view the discussion, visit: https://community.jboss.org/message/715912#715912 -------------------------------------------------------------- Hello Peter - Thank you for the quick response!  I confess I hadn't spent any time looking at web services, since we weren't planning on using a web client.  I'll check out the RESTful services as you suggest, and (unfortunately) likely be back with more naive questions. I am wondering about the complexity and difficulty of maintenance of this kind of setup.  Given that there's only a few of us and we don't have an infinite amount of time to get all of this up and running, (and that it'll really just be me who would be maintaining it in the future), I'm a little concerned about the learning curve.  Assuming a strong background in Java SE, but no experience with EJBs, web services, or getting an application server up and running, any thoughts on how long it would take to gain at least a basic familiarity with these things?  (I know, it may be an un-answerable question.) -------------------------------------------------------------- Reply to this message by going to Community [https://community.jboss.org/message/715912#715912] Start a new discussion in Beginner's Corner at Community [https://community.jboss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&...]

cmolodo [https://community.jboss.org/people/cmolodo] created the discussion "Re: Using JBoss as back-end for remote thick client?" To view the discussion, visit: https://community.jboss.org/message/715932#715932 -------------------------------------------------------------- Our major reason for looking into the application server setup is that we want to manage the number of available connections to the database. The problem is that the database we want the app to talk to is a general resource shared by more than just our department.  Our old apps are only used by a relatively small number of people, so in creating those we didn't worry about keeping track of how many concurrent copies might be running (and hence how many concurrent connections they're generating).  However, this new app will be much more widely used (in the range of 100-150 people would potentially be using it, vs the 15-20 currently), and we're concerned about potentially affecting all the other users if we don't have some middle layer regulating access for our app.  (It's a big commercial system which a separate dedicated team maintains, and most people just use apps from the same vendor to interact with it - I assume those apps are connecting through some middle tier, but I don't really know, and it's all C/C++ based in any case.)  It's not the transactional isolation that we're concerned with, since as you say database systems are designed to provide ways to handle concurrency issues. A second issue which came up recently is that the commercial system was updated and the underlying database schema changed slightly.  We have a bunch of small apps (again, used by only a few people) which retrieve information from it, and although most of them were communicating through a couple of base access classes, in a number of places some extra SQL queries had crept in, and we had to hunt down all of them to make sure they matched the new schema.  One thing we were hoping is that by using Hibernate as an interface for the database we would avoid that kind of problem in the future. Maybe the application server idea is overkill?  Assuming we're careful with our transaction demarcations and try to optimize our SQL queries to minimize database load, could we get away with just connecting directly the way we have been?  (Again, I apologize for the dumb questions!  Thank you for your patience!) -------------------------------------------------------------- Reply to this message by going to Community [https://community.jboss.org/message/715932#715932] Start a new discussion in Beginner's Corner at Community [https://community.jboss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&...]

cmolodo [https://community.jboss.org/people/cmolodo] created the discussion "Re: Using JBoss as back-end for remote thick client?" To view the discussion, visit: https://community.jboss.org/message/715967#715967 -------------------------------------------------------------- Okay, here is a really dumb question: to set up our own connection pooling between multiple invocations of an app in separate JVMs, wouldn't we need some middle layer to maintain the connection pool and provide a naming service so that the app can request the connection?  This is what I had understood, which is why I was looking at app servers, which provide both.  I'm probably missing something really obvious here.  (We're using Sybase JConnect by the by, and it does indeed support connection pooling.) As for the credentials, you're right, they do vary on an app-by-app basis (though actually not on a user-by-user basis, and there are only two sets, one for read-only apps and one with some limited write access).  I was naively thinking one would do this by just setting up two different data sources, which actually access the same database but with different credentials, but I'll have to look into that further - thanks for the heads-up! We were hoping that by using Hibernate we could enforce the use of data transfer objects that would in some measure be independent of the underlying schema, with the mappings and read/write logic specific to the schema hidden from the client apps, so that when the schema changed all we'd have to do is alter the mappings, etc.  (Of course this is only for relatively small changes - I would assume that for any major restructuring all bets are off.)  But I don't know how realistic that idea is, having never used Hibernate (other than building the tutorial example). -------------------------------------------------------------- Reply to this message by going to Community [https://community.jboss.org/message/715967#715967] Start a new discussion in Beginner's Corner at Community [https://community.jboss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&...]

Peter Johnson [https://community.jboss.org/people/peterj] created the discussion "Re: Using JBoss as back-end for remote thick client?" To view the discussion, visit: https://community.jboss.org/message/716381#716381 -------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, you are not sounding argumentative or obnoxious, I'm just really busy. I've never set up a connection pool using just the JDBC driver, so I'm not sure how it works in practice. And the more I think about it the more I think that the pool is available only to the one app, and not across multiple apps. But then i have been wrong about stuff like this before! The idea to set up two data sources in JBoss AS, one for each credential, would work. Your update requests would use the update data source, and reads would use the other data source. And we are still waiting on someone with more Hibernate expertise to comment on schema changes... -------------------------------------------------------------- Reply to this message by going to Community [https://community.jboss.org/message/716381#716381] Start a new discussion in Beginner's Corner at Community [https://community.jboss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&...]