Dynamic Invocation Of EJB's ?

Question

I am intending to write a dispatcher class that takes the name of an EJB at
runtime and then looks up and invokes a method on the EJB. I was intending
to
create a simple interface that the EJB will implement something like:-
public interface DynamicEJBDef
public void dynamicMethod() throws Exception;
The dynamic method would be implemented in the Bean class and thus the
Remote class.
Then to invoke I was thinking of something like the following:-
String ejbJNDIName = "testEJB";
EJBHome ejbHome = (EJBHome) ctx.lookup(ejbJNDIName);
DynamicEJBDef ejbObj = (DynamicEJBDef) ejbHome.create();
ejbObj.dynamicMethod();
Has anyone done this before ? Will it work and if not any other
suggestions...?
TIA

Answer 1

We did this a couple of year ago with a servlet that called a
'GenericRequestHandler' class. The servlet was passed an xml message in the
request that had a header that contained the request type. The data for the
request was in a body portion of the xml message. We used the information in
the header to call a request handler factory class that returned a request
handler that would deal with the message type. Most of the time, if the request
was generic enough, it returned the 'GenericRequestHandler'. If the request was
more complex, the factory would return a specific request handler. The request
handler classes all implemented the same interface and used the header info to
map to a jndi lookup of an entity ejb, and a call to an appropriate method on
the entity ejb. It was great if all of the requests were of a generic nature.
Kind of a poor man's SOAP request.
The hassle was parsing all the xml and figuring out what to do in the factory,
as well as, writing the specific request handlers when the requests got more
complex. The specific request handlers got pretty involved.
I don't have access to the code....and if I did I couldn't give it to you....or
they would kill me. ;-)
But, it worked.
Bill
Martin J Porter wrote:
I am intending to write a dispatcher class that takes the name of an EJB at
runtime and then looks up and invokes a method on the EJB. I was intending
to
create a simple interface that the EJB will implement something like:-
public interface DynamicEJBDef
public void dynamicMethod() throws Exception;
The dynamic method would be implemented in the Bean class and thus the
Remote class.
Then to invoke I was thinking of something like the following:-
String ejbJNDIName = "testEJB";
EJBHome ejbHome = (EJBHome) ctx.lookup(ejbJNDIName);
DynamicEJBDef ejbObj = (DynamicEJBDef) ejbHome.create();
ejbObj.dynamicMethod();
Has anyone done this before ? Will it work and if not any other
suggestions...?
TIA