Thursday, May 27, 2010

Developer Insight 1: Integrating C clients with EJBs

Hello!

A little known feature of BlackTie is that it provides the developer with the ability to easily integrate C/C++ based clients or VB based applications with JBoss.

Essentially, the client is able to utilise a standard API (XATMI) to asynchronously invoke services deployed in the application server. The fist service invoked in the application server must be a user-defined XATMI service (a specialised standard MDB), after this however EJBs may be invoked from there as normal.

We intend to explain a few of these examples in our wiki and on the blog, but here are a few examples to get started with:

1. There already exists a Java back office application deployed onto JBoss and an existing VB application currently running in isolation, perhaps submitting jobs via ftp as a batch overnight. Here the VB application can load our dlls and invoke the application via the XATMI service intermediary.

2. Currently an application is deployed entirely using the C API XATMI of an alternative vendor such as Tuxedo. As the business evolves, it is determined that a migration to Java for the backend systems would be a more suitable match however the client terminals that currently submit jobs for service do not have a JVM available. BlackTie is an ideal replacement here as the terminal clients would ideally just need relinking against the BlackTie libraries, while the backend can be developed in Java at will.

As I mentioned earlier, we will be providing more examples of this hopefully over the coming weeks...

All the best,
Tom

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