Does the use of JCA (locally, on the same box as tamino, not in a distributed environment) circumvent the X-Machine commands with native Java connections of some sort? Or does JCA use HTTP and hence not improve connection performance? I like the platform-agnosticism of X-Machine, but HTTP adds uneeded overhead to a lot of pure-java apps we are developing (e.g. an HTTP request to an app on Tomcat becomes an HTTP request to Apache through the java API- it’s kind of ridiculous). Unfortunately, though I’m an old servlet hand, I’ve never grasped the deal with the whole J2EE stack, and don’t know how Tamino, the JCA and whatever (app server? EJB in a container?) integrate, and what advantages it might provide (beyond transactions).
Also, what about JCA in a distributed environment? Does JCA use RMI to communicate with Tamino instead of HTTP? If so, does RMI beat HTTP speed-wise? Scalability-wise?
Thanks in advance for any help.