some questions on distributed architecture for threaded server

[marc dauncey]

Hi everyone,I'm not sure this is exactly the right forum as theres a fair bit of overlap with the other subjects, but here goes.

I am designing a server that will be used to update lucene indexes - don't worry if you haven't used it, its not lucene i need advice with.

the server will take requests via web services and then allocate discrete jobs to a bunch of index worker threads.

my question is, would you write this as a standalone java server or would you base it in an app server? we use apache tomcat and i understand that user threads can be used despite them being prohibited by the spec.

the advantages from my perspective of using an app server would be reliability, clustering etc - the fact that i won't need to mess round with IO threading simply to receive requests.

whats the best archictecture for a system like this and what are the drawbacks of using an app server to host it?

and are there issues in choosing soap as a protocol over rmi? i don't plan to serialise large object graphs into xml, the requests and responses should be manageable.

sorry if this question doesn't fit here, or if its already been answered previously - many thanks for your advice!

marc
[ April 22, 2006: Message edited by: marc dauncey ]

[William Brogden]

 

my question is, would you write this as a standalone java server or would you base it in an app server? we use apache tomcat and i understand that user threads can be used despite them being prohibited by the spec.

If this was my problem I would consider writing a class that can be used two ways - as a stand alone application or as an instance loosely attached to Tomcat.

Just formulate the way job instructions are passed and queued up for execution so that they can come from either a file or a request. This approach would have the highly desirable effect of being testable outside the server environment.

We are not really talking about a user thread here since the threads would be indirectly created to execute a specific indexing chore.

Bill

[marc dauncey]

Many thanks Bill, thats completely answered my question.

I'm now off to the threading forum to ask some questions about blocking queues and patterns!

Thank you

Marc