Help:simple RMI example

[lianghua21cn]

I'm a new comer for Spring RMI and try to finish a simplest example according to Spring DOC.

The only different thing is I try to use a servlet in the client side.

The following is the fragment of client web.xml

<context-param> 
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> 
<param-value>/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml</param-value> 
</context-param>

The web.xml of server is the same.

The client side applicationContext.xml:

<beans>
<bean class="au.com.client.ClientObject">
	<property name="accountService" ref="remoteAccountService"/>
</bean>

<bean id="remoteAccountService" class="org.springframework.remoting.rmi.RmiProxyFactoryBean">
	<property name="serviceUrl" value="rmi://HOST/AccountService"/>
	<property name="serviceInterface" value="au.com.vodafone.service.AccountService"/>
</bean>

</beans>

And in the client side servlet:

		ClientObject c = new ClientObject();
		AccountService a= c.getAccountService();

ClientObject:

package au.com.client;

import au.com.vodafone.service.AccountService;

public class ClientObject {
	private AccountService accountService;

	public AccountService getAccountService() {
		return accountService;
	}
	public void setAccountService(AccountService accountService) {
		this.accountService = accountService;
	}

}

The error message I got shows that "AccountService a is null". I think the problem might be the configuration in web.xml.

Thanks!

[wpoitras]

You need to retrieve the ClientObject from a Spring application context, not create it with new. When you create it with new Spring is not involved and therefore the accountService property won't be set.

[lianghua21cn]

Yes, that‘s right!

I should use ApplicationContext.getBean() something like that.

[wpoitras]

Yes. And if you initialize a web context in your web.xml you would use a WebApplicationContext which gets bound to your servlet context on startup by a ContextLoaderListener or ContextLoaderServlet (depending on which one you use)

So you could set your ClientObject as a property of your servlet init:

private ClientObject clientObject;
private WebApplicationContext context;
public void init(ServletConfig config) {
  context = WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(config.getServletContext());
  clientObject = context.getBean("myClientObject"); // have to set a name in your applicationContext.xml
}