Bidirectional Connections

Use Cases for Bidirectional Connections

An Ice connection normally allows requests to flow in only one direction. If an application's design requires the server to make callbacks to a client, the server usually establishes a new connection to that client in order to send callback requests, as shown below:

Callbacks in an open network.

Unfortunately, network restrictions often prevent a server from being able to create a separate connection to the client, such as when the client resides behind a firewall as shown here:

Callbacks with a firewall.

In this scenario, the firewall blocks any attempt to establish a connection directly to the client.

For situations such as these, a bidirectional connection offers a solution. Requests may flow in both directions over a bidirectional connection, enabling a server to send callback requests to a client over the client's existing connection to the server.

There are two ways to make use of a bidirectional connection. First, you can use a Glacier2 router, in which case bidirectional connections are used automatically. If you do not require the functionality offered by Glacier2 or you do not want an intermediary service between clients and servers, you can configure bidirectional connections manually.

The remainder of this section discusses manual configuration of bidirectional connections. An example that demonstrates how to configure a bidirectional connection is provided in the directory demo/Ice/bidir of your Ice distribution.

 

Configuring a Client for Bidirectional Connections

A client needs to perform the following steps in order to configure a bidirectional connection:

1. Create an object adapter to receive callback requests. This adapter does not require a name or endpoints if its only purpose is to receive callbacks over bidirectional connections.