Reliability of Forte's OLE Automation Server

Question

Hi Forte Users,
We are currently working on the feasibility of developing OLE interface
for our existing Forte services. In that process we are wondering about the
reliability these Forte OLE servers as compared to any other normal Forte
Servers. Has anyone have any experience of using them or any ideas about the
thing we need to concentrate before starting the development of these
servers.
Any input on this issue will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Charu.
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Answer 1

A point worth mentioning here is about fail-over of service objects
that are configured as OLE automation servers.
If you are using Forte clients to talk to the service object,
then you really will not see any changes in automatic failover
situations.
However, in case of a non-Forte client( a.k.a. OLE client ), the
automatic failover does not happen. The non-Forte clients should be
coded to detect communication failures with the primary server. They
should have the intelligence to re-connect and retry methods on the (
new ) OLE server. This means you will have to program fail-over logic in
non-Forte clients, which you get for free with Forte clients.
I am not sure what kind of requirements is driving your process of
converting Forte services to OLE servers, but it is worth deliberating
on this problem, if you are not planning to use non-Forte clients, but
want to implement the services as OLE automation server.
Ofcourse you don't have to worry about this issue if you are not
planning to use non-Forte clients...
Good luck
Ajith Kallambella M.
Forte Consultant.
Please respond to Shi-Long Yin <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Reliability of Forte's OLE Automation Server
Hi,
Essentially, I don't see any big differences between configuring and
exporting
the Forte service objects as normal Forte servers and DCE, Encina,
Tuxedo,
Object Broker, IIOP or OLE servers. We have already succeeded
configuring the
Forte servers as IIOP and OLE servers. Our Visual Basic client can
communicate
with the OLE server. The big difficulties are that there are two
limitations to
what elements of the service object&euro;s class are available to an OLE
client.
First, an OLE client application can access any methods provided by that
service
object&euro;s class, except for methods that use objects as parameters.
Second, OLE
clients can not access attributes of a Forte service object. OLE
clients can
only pass the following objects and data types as parameters and return
values:
TOOL data type Maps to OLE data type
Boolean Boolean
Cdispatch IDispatch
Cunknown IUnknown
Double Double
Float Float
Integer Long
i2 Iteger
string String
ui2 Short
ui4 Long
If a Forte service object includes methods that have object parameters
or return
values other than CUnknown and CDispatch, these methods are not included
as part
of the interface to this OLE server. Compared to the IIOP
configurations, the
limitations listed above may be too strict, especially, when you want to
export
your existing Forte services which may have interfaces with classes as
their
parameters or return types. But for IIOP, you can freely pass class
objects
(even deeply nested and derived) as method&euro;s parameters or return
values. This
feature has significantly saved our development and maintenance time.
Other
alternatives may be to write the wrappers to overcome these limitations.
In one word, if you intend to integrate the EXISTING codes, which have
methods
with class parameters, you'd better to avoid configuring Forte service
objects
as OLE server. Try to use IIOP as much as you can because it is more
OOP
compatible and interoperable.
Shilong Yin
US West in Denver
=====================================================================
Charu wrote:
Hi Forte Users,
We are currently working on the feasibility of developing OLE interface
for our existing Forte services. In that process we are wondering about the
reliability these Forte OLE servers as compared to any other normal Forte
Servers. Has anyone have any experience of using them or any ideas about the
thing we need to concentrate before starting the development of these
servers.
Any input on this issue will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Charu.
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