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Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:02:16 +0100
From: Mark Brouwer <mark.brouwer@cheiron.org>
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To: river-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: Anyone working on some kind of an attachment capability for
 services
 which would behave transparently and similar to SOAP attachments or the like?
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Hi Wade,

I think a better place for these kind of questions would be jini-users
or river-user as this place is more to discuss the actual development of
the Jini codebase. For you this has the benefit that a larger community
is to your avail, also sometimes the jini-users archives can answer your
question.

Wade Chandler wrote:
> I'm playing around with JINI (still), and I'm wondering about
> attachments so large streams and documents can be easily attached in
> service calls much like what happens behind the scenes with SOAP. AXIS
> is a good example in that with AXIS we can use FileDataSource (or any
> DataSource as long as there is a deserializer for it)
> 
http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/glasgow/javadocs/javax/activation/FileDataSource.html
> 
> and then the APIs of AXIS will handle the streaming of the datasource
> embedded in the call. I know I can do it with loops and custom things
> calling other methods to send a file etc, but I thought I would see what
> if anything was available or being planned by anyone else. This would be
> for proxy services and not smart proxies where the code would reside in
> the same JVM.

Where others in the world have the tendency to assume that remoteness is
actually a trivial problem we (Jini people) have the tendency to assume
that each use case is that different that it is nearly impossible to
come up with something that works for 80% of the people :-)

So the answer is that while this is a regular question that pops up
(Martin I believe is facing the same problem), most of the time people
are left with advice how to create something like that while IMHO the
(Utopian?) answer should be "party X has a service you can download and
utilize in your software system, or at least the preferred API for doing
such thing you can find here". Today I'm not going to deviate from this
pattern :-)

John McClain has done some work in this direction, although I'm not that
familiar with the API besides that a quick scan made clear it didn't
work for my use case (I needed notifications of progress, among a few
other things) but you can find more information here
https://user-jwfmcclain.dev.java.net/holowaa/holowaa.html . John it
would be good if the business API of Holowaa was available on the
website, because downloading to look for it is a real hurdle and makes
discussing it rather impossible.

Also this thread gives you a good overview of possible solutions
http://archives.java.sun.com/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0608&L=JINI-USERS&P=R120

Still it would be interesting for the future if we (River) could come up
with a business interface for this problem that would satisfy most
people (and maybe Holowaa is that interface).

I realize that implementing is often equally hard if you want proper
support for leases, transactions and persistence, but if that becomes a
problem I will do my shameless plug at that point.
-- 
Mark