CORBA34 — Bi-directional connections considered volatile at connection acceptor side

This issue was mentioned by Dave Stringer. I now file it as an issue.

When a bi-directional connection is established between a connection initiator and a connection acceptor, the connection acceptor may have to consider this bi-directional connection is volatile, i.e., the connection acceptor may lose (and is not able to resume) its capability of making invocations on such a connection anytime. For example, the connection may be lost due to network problems or the client may close a connection due to an idle time-out. These situations are not a problem for uni-directional GIOP because the ORB who wants to make an invocation can always initiate a new connection when the old connection is not available.

This problem may be less serious when bi-directional communication occurs only during the period of an invocation from the connection initiator. In other words, if the connection is lost and results in the failure of bi-directional "callback", the connection initiator may retry, effectively resuming the bi-directional connection.

On the other hand, for the use case in which a connection initiator "registers" an object reference to the connection acceptor, there is no guarantee that "callbacks" from the connection acceptor to the connection initiator will eventually succeed, assuming the network is not always down.

If this issue is a limitation that cannot be solved easily, we should spell it out in the spec.

Deferred

This proposal was generated automatically by request of the Task Force Chair Adam Mitz.