Comments on: Grails Remoting with Hessian, Burlap and HttpInvoker

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:11:55 +0000

Thanks for this information!
Especially the suggestion to HttpInvoker.
And because of your blog I know the difference of all the remoting libraries in one sentence:
RMI is not firewall friendly, and XML-RPC/SOAP would mean a lot of extra work.

Great!

By: Erik Pragt

Erik Pragt — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:36:25 +0000

Hi Jawher,

I’m glad I could help! I already forgot which exceptions I got, but there were indeed many. Normally, when using Grails + Hibernate, this isn’t a problem since no remoting is involved, and you won’t notice all the proxies and Hibernate specific collections.

So, when using remoting, I guess the easiest way out is indeed HttpInvoker!

Cheers,

Erik Pragt

By: Jawher

Jawher — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:15:26 +0000

Hi,
Erik, I owe you one ! It indeed turned out that Hessian + Hibernate entities are not good friends … you end up getting very confusing exceptions (especially on the server side).
Whereas when using Spring Remoting instead, it works like a charm.

Cheers,
Jawher

By: Groovy on Grails : Grails Podcast Episode 67: Newscast for September 27 2008 (Sven Haiges & Glen Smith)

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:20:09 +0000

[...] Grails Remoting wiht Hessian, Burlap and HttpInvoker [...]

By: Jawher

Jawher — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:46:28 +0000

Hi again,
Thanks Erik for taking the time to answer my request
This will prove very useful as I’m planning to use Spring Remoting (via Hessian for now) for transferring Hibernate entities.

Cheers,
Jawher.

By: Erik Pragt

Erik Pragt — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:56:02 +0000

Hi Jawher,

Thanks for the reaction. One of the problems we encountered problems with Hessian/Burlap when encountering Hibernate Collections. It seems Hessian/Burlap doesn’t know how to handle customized serialization for Hibernate Collections. One solution to this would be to copy all collections to new collections (for example you could copy your domain to DTO’s for example, and you solve two problems at the same time), but this costs some extra work, so we didn’t want to take that path.

HttpInvoker didn’t have these problems, it just worked, probably because HttpInvoker uses Java’s own serialization, instead of a custom serialization.

Also, because of Grails Remoting plugin issues at that time, it was quite hard to see what was working and what wasn’t: even when things worked, we got a lot of exceptions.

So, in short, I would advise to check the new 1.0 version of the remoting plugin, and see what works for you. In the end, if you have only Java (compatible) clients, I would go for HttpInvoker: it’s fast, firewall friendly and can serialize all Java objects without problems.

By: Jawher

Jawher — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:34:45 +0000

Hi,
Thanks for sharing this.
Could you please elaborate on the HttpInvoker section ? What problems exactly did it solve (in comparison with Hessian) ?

Cheers,
Jawher