Validating reference to remote bean

Question

Hi,
I am writing a servlet filter, accessing a stateless session bean. The filter uses the bean to log requests.
The problem I have is that for performance I do not wish to newly lookup the home object of the bean and reinstantiate a bean upon every request or even upon each access to the bean. I want to do it upon initialization or lazy upon first request and then use the reference during subsequent requests.
However if someone redeploys the bean (which is probably more likely during development than during production use, still it is possible in both cases) the reference that my filter holds becomes invalid.
As I would consider it pretty ugly to surround each call to the bean with a try-catch block to check whether the bean is still there, I am searching for a way to find out whether the reference I have access to still points to a valid instance.
Something myLoggerBean.stillthere(), which lets me create a new one in case someone redeployed the bean.
Any chance of doing that or will I have to stick with my exception handling like:
try{
myLoggerBean.logtherequest(req);
} catch(RuntimeException e)
myLoggerBean = getNewLoggerBean();
myLoggerBean.logTheRequest(req);
Any input is appreciated, thanks in advance
Robbi

Answer 1

Thank you for the input.
Apparently what you are proposing and what I already almost implemented is the only way to do it. Right now I have a problem using a JBoss Bug. The reinstantiation of the bean fails after the redeployment of the bean. However this is due to the fact that the filter and the bean are in separate packages (filter is in axis.war, bean is in separate jar - file). Others have had that problem with JBoss, even though remote interface was used not local. So I will probably have to move them into one ear and then things will work.
Unfortunately we do need to log using such a heavy weight solution. Of course this is not used for all simple log output of the software. We do use Log4J for that, this solution is only for request and response SOAP.
We are creating a life science software which needs to record the webservice requests arriving at our replication. This is so that at a later point in time we can perfectly reconstruct what requests arrived and what responses were send out, in case someone blaims us to have caused harm by wrong results.
Thanks again for answering.
Greets Robbi