I2JAV13 — J2EE ORB Socket Factory API

In order to meet the interoperability compliance requirements,
ORBs must include an IIOP implementation using TCP/IP plain text
sockets. J2EE implementations are required to support CSIv2 and
thus need additional control over the sockets an ORB creates.
It may be necessary

• to get the ORB to listen on additional sockets, of differing
  types
• to get the ORB to connect to alternative sockets, of different
  types, for a given IOR
• for information about these sockets to be included in object
  references exported by the ORB
• for socket data to be available to request interceptors, e.g
  SSL certificates

Portable IORInterceptors can be used to add this information as
tagged components in the profiles within an IOR.

A mechanism is required to modify the ORB's behaviour to allow
it to handle different socket types, listen on additional sockets,
connect to alternative sockets and make additional data available
to interceptors.

Since this is a J2EE requirement which needs speedy resolution,
it seems appropriate to resolve it by the addition of Java
specific APIs in the IDL to Java specification. For example,

• a pluggable ORB socket factory could be introduced which would
  be used whenever the ORB needed to create a serverSocket or an
  outbound socket for a given IOR or end point

• a means of registering such a socket factory would be required.
  Options for this include:-
  . adding an ORB method: this may cause problems in initialisation
  . adding a Java specific extension to the PI ORBInitInfo interface
  so that the registration would need to be called from the
  pre_init/post_init methods in an ORBInitializer: this ties the
  Socket Factory with PIs, but both are likely to be required
  for J2EE.

• a means of specifying ports on which an ORB/POA should listen
  would be useful but this may be infeasible as part of this issue
  due to the variety of ORB/POA implementations.

• the PI Client and ServerRequestInfo and IORInfo interfaces may
  need to be extended to support access to Connection related data