[wildfly-dev] EJB over HTTP

[Jason Greene]

> On May 4, 2016, at 8:11 AM, David M. Lloyd <david.lloyd at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> On 05/04/2016 12:50 AM, Stuart Douglas wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>> 
>> I have started looking into support for service invocation over HTTP.
>> Unlike our existing HTTP upgrade support this will map EJB
>> requests/responses directly to HTTP requests and responses, which should
>> allow it to be used behind existing load balancers.
>> 
>> I have started an initial description of the protocol at:
>> https://github.com/stuartwdouglas/wildfly-http-client/blob/master/docs/wire-spec-v1.asciidoc
>> 
>> The intention is to follow HTTP semantics as closely as possible.
>> Clustering will be provided in a similar manner to web clustering (i.e.
>> it will require a load balancer, and work in a similar manner to web
>> clustering).
>> 
>> There is still plenty work that needs to be done (especially around
>> security), so if anyone has any feedback let me know.
> 
> One thing I was thinking was that we could possibly support multiple 
> marshalling strategies in the future by way of content-type, since that 
> header has a useful negotiation strategy already defined.
> 
> It could even be done using the defined types e.g. 
> application/x-ejb-invocation;version=2;m=protobuf or whatever. 
> Something to think about for the future…

I think pluggable encoding types is essential. IMO I think we should aim for protobufs and marshaling for the first impl. While this isn’t intended as a JAX-RS replacement, we should allow for the possibility of non Java clients to directly trigger EJB invocations. 

--
Jason T. Greene
WildFly Lead / JBoss EAP Platform Architect
JBoss, a division of Red Hat