Re: Application Scoped Object in Web Service

From:

"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@hotmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:34:12 -0700

Message-ID:

<plXRi.6866$lE2.6631@newssvr22.news.prodigy.net>

Matt wrote:

Hello,

I'm an experienced C# dev working on a new project in Java (haven't
touched it since college) and was wondering if I could get some input
on my design. I have a search engine object that will take a non-
trivial amount of time to instantiate and that I need to be exposed
via a web service - it will be a singleton, so that every web service
request will be serviced by it rather than having the overhead of
instantiating a new search engine object with each call.

In C#, I would typically create a Windows service backend that would
host the singleton object and then hook the web service up via .NET
remoting over a TCP binary channel. This has worked great in the past,
but being new to Java I was wondering if there is a better solution to
my problem available in this camp. In Java, I am currently building a
backend service/daemon that will host the singleton and expose it to
the web service via RMI... basically the same pattern with different
libraries.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but why not co-locate the seatrch engine with
the web service? Create it in Servlet.init() and dispose of it in
Servlet.destroy(); (As far as I know, there's no equivalent of
Servlet.init() in .NET; it allows you to perform initiialization when the
container starts up, as opposed to when the first request is received.)