Using Remote Protocols like Hessian, HttpInvoker with Spring.net

[springtide]

Hi there,

I have a short question concerning Remote Protocols:

Does Spring.net support the usage of Remote Protocols like Hessian(C#) or the HttpInvoker?

On the one site I have a java+web environment that should communicate with the C# world on the other site. My plan is to use Spring on both sites communicating via the mentioned protocols.


Thanks

Steve

[Mark Pollack]

Hi Steve,

Spring does not support Hessian or the HttpInvoker but it could in principal. Hessian on C# seems to have a fair number of problems judging from their forums. I'd be interested to hear your experience with it. HttpInvoker in Spring (Java) uses standard Java serialization, so the equivalent in .NET would be to use .NET serialization which isn't good for your mixed platform use-case. There is not a defacto interop binary serialization format, you might try to experiement with adobe's AMF format. There are a few libraries on the .NET side, 'FlexBridge' (http://using.castleproject.org/display/Contrib/Castle.FlexBridge), 'Fluorine' (http://osflash.org/fluorine), and many on the Java side. Though of course this was intended for flex -> language 'x' conversion. If binary serialization is not important to you, you could get quite far creating XML schema and generating the data objects from that on both Java and C#, building up a simple wsdl spec and placing that in a web services call (document style). If you want to use web services for 'xml messaging' then check out Spring (Java) web services (http://static.springframework.org/spring-ws/site/). If you think you can use JMS, you might check out If you are using JMS, take a look at my article on InfoQ (http://www.infoq.com/articles/jms-spring-messaging-interop) where I wrote a small C#/Java object marshaller for JMS.

Please post back, I'm curious to hear what you ended up doing. This may also be an area where Interface21 can help out in a consulting capacity, let me know if that is of interest to you.

Cheers,
Mark