Scaling enterprise apps down...

Here is a situation that I'm looking at. Lets say there is a large Java enterprise
application using EJBs and all that fun stuff. Inside this application will
need to be a sales module for industry-specific order processing and CRM.
Now this same sales module will need to be capable of running in a remote
environment, devoid of a network or internet connection, and on a device
with relatively limited horsepower. (laptop, or possibly scaled down to a
PDA device)

Originally with an earlier product, this was handled by two seperate applications
that communicated with one another via a data synchronization element. However
this required the same business rules to exist and be maintained in two different
applications. The new goal is to write one set of business objects (EJBs)
for both roles.

Is it possible to automatically "sync" EJBs from a server to a local copy
running on a laptop when it's connected to the network, and has anyone had
much experience doing something similar to this? I'm interested in getting
a feel for what the performance implications are for running an app server
on a laptop (or PDA?!) or if there are suitable alternative technologies
available.

Steve.

Steve,
First check out this article - http://www.javadude.com/articles/. You
really should avoid putting business logic in techology specific APIs. I
don't think EJB's will run well, if at all, in the current PDA environment.
Second, check out Java Web Start and associated products (some based on
it). There was an article on this lately. Can't remember where. Some other
products - Zero G

http://developer.java.sun.com/develo...gramming/jnlp/


Mark

"MarkN" <java.@127.0.0.1> wrote:
>
>Steve,
> First check out this article - http://www.javadude.com/articles/. You
>really should avoid putting business logic in techology specific APIs.
I
>don't think EJB's will run well, if at all, in the current PDA environment.

Can you please explain what you mean to "avoid putting business logic in
technology specific APIs"? Are you referring to how I tried to describe the
use of EJBs? From what I've investigated so far, what I'm looking at is a
Enterprise application with a thin (not browser based) client using EJBs
& JBoss that needs to be capable of running on a laptop.

> Second, check out Java Web Start and associated products (some based on
>it). There was an article on this lately. Can't remember where. Some
other

We're currently using Webstart for the client distribution, and investigating
it for laptop distributions as well. The issue is that the laptop is going
to need to function isolated from the server environment, so it's a question
of if we should replicate the server components, or find some other way to
reuse the code developed for the server to handle the laptop when not connected
to the server.

Steve