I am creating a web portal used to status and control a legacy system. This is not the first portal of this kind that i have developed. However my thinking is a bit outdated and I'm looking for specific suggestions relative to several functions.
The legacy system is statused and controlled using standard UDP interfaces. Our web portal will use a glassfish server to serve up the status and control views. Additionally status information collected from the legacy system will be stored to database. The web views will then draw status from the database for presentation to a system maintainer.
In the past we would have implemented a C++ or Java application interface from the legacy system to the database. Rather than adopt this approach (which would require maintenance of this application separate from the application server), I'm considering options such as JCA. Initially i was actually thinking that i would just create a servlet that opened a socket and communicated with the legacy system. This does not seem like the right approach.
Its not clear to me that JCA is the right approach either. There is a lot of discussion of "tight coupling" in the context of JCA and it almost seems like any JCA interface should be connection oriented. Our UDP interfaces to the legacy system are clearly connectionless.
Can people please offer suggestions relative to how to solve this legacy interface? Should I stick with an application that is separate from the application server, or should i look for integration into the application service using technologies such as JCA? Assuming that I do want more integration into the application service, is JCA the way to go or is there an alternative.
To the extent that JCA is the way to go can you please point me to an online sample or to relative to the creation of an appropriate adapter. I'm assuming that I would need to create both an "inbound resource adapter" and an "outbound resource adapter".
Thanks in advance for any insights into this decision.
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