I am planning to remodel my current application and I am not sure if this is the right approach.
Currently
I have a Java Enterprise server application with 3 web-applications and an ejb-application which handles the database (JPA with EJB-Facades). Everything in one single project (deployed as an ear file).
The web-applications are quite independent, though they all use the same database and the same entities. So, they all depend on the ejb-application.
What I would like to do
I would like to separate the web-applications, so they can run independently and I don’t need to redeploy everything, only because I make a change in one application.
The idea is to create a single jar library that contains remote interfaces for the existing facade beans. That way I can setup the jar to be a server wide available library and deploy my ejb-application that then will implement the remote interfaces.
The 3 web-applications would only have to import my library and have full access to the database.
Now, I am not even sure if this is a recommendable way, since I guess the remote ejbs might have a serious impact on performance due to serialization (or don’t they ?).
And what about the database entity classes? Since every web-application uses them when accessing the database, they need to be in the jar as well. But having an ejb-application for database access that does not contain the actual entity classes – that just feels off.
———— ———— ————
|web1| |web2| |web3|
———— ———— ————
| /
——————— ——— ———
| JAR | |EJB|——————————>|DB |
——————— ——— ———
entity classes <---import----- db-facades
remote ejbs <---implement---/