Introduction

Burlap and Hessian use type names in two contexts:

• as <type> values for lists and objects.
• as mangled names for method overloading

The mapping from a language's types to the Burlap/Hessian names is necessarily language dependent, but designed for cross-language use.

Java to Burlap/Hessian

The mapping of specific Java types to Burlap/Hessian is relatively straightforward. A Java implementation will also use this mapping when it's parsing and knows the type of the object. Contrast that with the Burlap to Java mapping. Note that XML DOM is mapped to a string.

Java	Burlap
null	null
String	string
boolean	boolean
byte	int
short	int
int	int
long	long
float	double
double	double
char	string
Boolean	boolean
Byte	int
Short	int
Integer	int
Long	long
Float	double
Double	double
Character	string

Java	Burlap
String	string
StringBuffer	string
char[]	string
org.w3c.dom.Node	string
byte[]	base64
Object[]	[object

Java	Burlap
Date	date
List	list
Vector	list
Map	map
HashMap	map
Hashtable	map
Object	map (with serialization)
EJBHome	remote (using HomeHandle)
EJBObject	remote (using Handle)

Note: Some of these conversions are lossy. For example, a Byte object serialized and then deserialized will become an Integer. This is the price paid working with other languages.

Method overloading

Java-based servers typically expose three overloaded methods:

• The simple method name, which corresponds to the shorted overloaded method.
• The method name with the number of arguments appended, e.g. add__2.
• The method name with the Burlap/Hessian types, e.g. add_int_int

In this case, all of "add" , "add__2", and "add_int_int" will map to the same method. The client will use whichever is appropriate to its capabilities. For example, many scripting languages can only handle the number of arguments as a mangling technique.

Burlap to Java

In several cases, a Java parser may know nothing about the expected type. For example, an method's argument might be Object or the serialized data may be in a Vector, or a client may not specify the type for a <map>.

Burlap	Java
null	null
boolean	Boolean
int	Integer
double	Double
string	String
date	Date
base64	byte []
list	ArrayList
map	HashMap

Changes

v3 changes (2001-12-27)

• Change ;ejbid= to ?ejbid=

v2 changes

• Change SML-RPC to Burlap

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