Non-Web Server Application

[Beta User]

I have requirements for creating an application that communicates to an external financial trading system. The application will initiate a connection to the trading system using Java libraries provided by the trading entity. The libraries appear to use RMI under the covers. Upon creating a session with the external trading system, the application will essentially just listen for 'notifications' from the trading entity by implementing a simple interface defined by the trading entity.

Given this brief synopsis, does a Spring application running on Spring AS make sense? If so, how would I go about architecting such a solution that essentially has no web interface or client interface but instead just needs to start running upon being deployed to initiate the connection and start listening for data. There is lots of information on building / deploying web-based applications but no so much for implementing a non-web server.

[Beta User]

It does sound very suitable for spring ap.
I'm still getting familiar with it myself, but I think you can just define a bundle with a bean with init and destroy methods for starting/shutting down the process and also set lazy-init to false on that bean. Then your bean should be created on deploy and destroyed on undeploy.

[Joris Kuipers]

If RMI is a hard requirement for you, then currently the Platform is not an option. You'll run into issues with deserialized objects for which the class cannot be found.
Future versions might fix this, but for now I'd advice you to either use another remoting mechanism (Spring remoting, Hessian or Burlap will all work) or another runtime environment.

Joris

[Beta User]

Thanks for the info. All of the RMI calls are hidden beneath a layer of their API which they want you to use to connect and call upon their business services so I am not sure that I can directly plug a remoting mechanism such as you mentioned into my application given the constraints of the API.