[jboss-as7-dev] Framework for Remoting Services

[Darran Lofthouse]

Working on the connection re-authentication and security propagation 
problem one area already identified that we need is a central service 
exposed over Remoting to co-ordinate this activity.  As this is an 
aspect of the overall solution that is fairly well understood I have 
been starting to assemble this so that the remainder of the decisions 
can have a little more context.

When I started work on Remoting JMX the first thing I did at the time 
was to look into the EJB over Remoting implementation to see how various 
problems were being solved, I believe when the JNDI over Remoting 
project was implemented both the EJB implementation and the Remoting JMX 
project were reviewed again before the problems were solved again for 
that project.

To avoid continually solving this same problem again and again I have 
been starting to split the common functionality out into a separate 
framework project so that the authentication service can use this 
without having to contain it's own implementation again: -

https://github.com/darranl/remoting-framework

At this point I am looking for any opinions on where this should live. 
(I also need to check some things internally as well but wanted to check 
with other engineers first)

I am not at this point intending for this to be released as a developers 
framework, at the moment it contains the capabilities I need for the 
authentication service and if other services can make use of it the 
capabilities can be expanded for those projects.

The current capabilities are: -
  * Connection establishment.
  * Channel Opening
    - Welcome message exchange (To verify correct channel)
    - Protocol version negotiation.
    - Mechanism to obtain strongly typed proxy to the other side of the 
channel.
    - Message Handler based message processing.
    - Support for conversations from short request/response 
conversations to longer running multiple message conversations.

As a channel is opened there is a notion of which side is initiating the 
channel opening, however this does not enforce a client/server notion 
beyond that.  Existing connections can be used so either side could have 
already opened a connection.  After a channel is opened both sides are 
presented with a strongly typed representation of the other side of the 
channel that can be used independently.

Regards,
Darran Lofthouse.