Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to The whole java thing, Tclblend and Webmail

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Posted by Ben Adida on
Dan, this is a *great* exploration of our possibilities. I've done the Java web development thing, and I agree with you that it is absolutely horrendous. However, if aD writes the Java, and we just have to change the SQL, it's not that big a deal.

What concerns me deeply, though, is the fact the interface is through process execution. This is a very bad solution from a scalability standpoint, because each call spawns a process which spawns a Java VM. That means that if there are 10 active connections, you have 10 parallel Java VMs that get created and killed, and that's pretty bad. That's as bad as CGI scripts each launching a Java VM (eek!).

I'm not downplaying your work, what you've done is 90% of what we need, and I'm psyched! The difference is that we need to have, as you mention, a standalone Java VM constantly running, accepting some kind of communication from AOLserver in a threaded manner.

Since Tcl Blend doesn't do it, we should go ahead and look into JNI and the C interface that allows us to launch a JVM and maybe interface that from an AOLserver module. I see no reason why this wouldn't work, but it should be investigated more.

This is great progress.