Besides the usual web container, ejb container, there are other ways to deploy apps. Batch, Grid, and JMS, besides a simple main() or an ANT task, are other common options. There are several concerns together, one is the deployment, another is the messaging, and the third one, not the last one, is the error handling.
- Deployment: There are just so much similarities in batches, and yet, not until now, someone takes the charge on abstracting this out to a container. Good job, Spring. Even just the batch abstraction is surely a big improvement. If Spring guys can unite the front with GRID, it's even better.
- Messaging: Most of the batch processes have a different way to communicate with callers, could be an asynchronous call, could leave the results in a file, than ordinary API calls. However, from the caller's perspective, it's just a plain call - get the result. This is common for all messagings. How can we abstract the common behaviors? What are they specifically?
- Error handling: I personally think this is the hardest part because JDK lacks of support on this. The basic scenario is that in certain cases when errors happen, the batch should record the errors somewhere and keeps going. A twist is how we could propagate the record errors in different threads.
Spring 2.1 is near.