Plugin based Web Service with session management

Question

I am trying to make a web service in java with jax-ws that should support extensions to the service without rebuilding the project. I thought it might be possible to make a standard web service and the let each plugin create their own service, making the client side plugin point to both the standard service and the plugin specific one. This way I could have user management and such in the standard service and the more plugin specific one in an other service. The problem is though, how do I make a common session for all the services? All services are running at the same server and on the same domain name.
I checked the HTTP headers and found out that the JSESSIONID was changing when I created a new port on the client side. I was trying to implement a SOAPHandler to edit the cookie in the HTTP header, hoping that this will lead to the same session across the services. But found it hard. It was no problem reading the "Set-cookie" header, setting the cookie on the new requests was harder, as the CookieJar object seems to be internal [1]. And the MessageContext.HTTP_REQUEST_HEADERS wasn't created at the time my handlers run. Is there an easy solution to this?
I am not sure if my idea is a good solution to the main problem, and all other ideas are more than welcome. I hope it is possible to extend the features of my server without rebuilding the project. If anything is unclear, feel free to ask :)
[1] com.sun.xml.internal.ws.client.http.CookieJar

Answer 1

Adhir_Mehta wrote:
Could you explain plug in scenario with one example?Ok. We have not chosen exactly how to do this, but the idea is that someone may be able to extend the functionality of our server without rebuilding the project. We thought of something like a jar file with a implementation of some abstract classes. It should at least only be necessary to redeploy the project into the web container. The problem is; how do we let the plugins extend our web interface? One solution we thought of was to let each plugin have it's own service and dynamicly link to the plugin services from the main service that we provide as standard in our server. This way we may have some kind of plugin support on the clients as well, making the client side plugins know what kind of service it needs on the server side and thus extending the functionality all together.
Hope that explains our scenario. Feel free to comment and add new ideas :)
Regarding session management, its not advisable to manage the session in web services since that way it will become non interoperable.The documentation we found regarding sessions and jax-ws was all doing sessions with HTTPSessions, and to let the web container handle that.
On the server side
    @Resource
    private WebServiceContext wsContext;
    private HttpSession getSession() {
        MessageContext mc = wsContext.getMessageContext();
        return ((javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest)mc.get(MessageContext.SERVLET_REQUEST)).getSession();
    HttpSession session = getSession();
    session.setAttribute("User", user);On the client side
((BindingProvider)port).getRequestContext().put(BindingProvider.SESSION_MAINTAIN_PROPERTY,true);Do you have other standard options for us on how to do session management? All ideas are more than welcome