Performance of a proposed JEE architecture

Question

I have concerns about the performance of the following architecture:

• j2ee application in an appserver, ejb session bean and DAOs
• remote (rich) client, a swing app. A classic, form-based client
• only one stateless ejb, the ejb is accessed via web services, not rmi, through a homegrown framework
• each web service request will get authenticated against an LDAP
• no state stored on the server, only client-side sessions

I guess working on the rich GUI will involve a remote call in every 2-10 seconds, or more, per user.

What do you think?

Answer 1

That's basically a client-server architecture. Whether it will work in practice in your case depends not only on the architecture diagram made of box and arrows, but will depend on a lot of other factors:

• performance and maturity of the home-grown web service framework?
• size of the data transferred between the tiers?
• performance of the authentication mechanism, number of roles, users, etc. ?
• ability to cache information here and there?
• how many concurrent users?
• etc.

To me, that looks like a possible architecture. But I suggest you identify potential bottlenecks (e.g. authentication of each request) and make sure it works for your non-functional requirements. If yes, fine, if not, adapt the architecture.