WorkArea service: Special considerations
Developers who use work areas should consider the following issues that could potentially cause problems: interoperability between the EJB and CORBA programming models; and the use of work areas with Java's Abstract Windowing Toolkit.
EJB and CORBA interoperability
Although the work area service can be used across the EJB and CORBA programming models, many composed data types cannot be successfully used across those boundaries. For example, if a SimpleSampleCompany instance is passed from the WebSphere environment into a CORBA environment, the CORBA application can retrieve the SimpleSampleCompany object encapsulated within a CORBA Any object from the work area, but it cannot extract the value from it. Likewise, an IDL-defined struct defined within a CORBA application and set into a work area is not readable by an application using the UserWorkArea class.
Best practice: Applications can avoid this incompatibility by directly setting only primitive types, like integers and strings, as values in work areas, or by implementing complex values with structures designed to be compatible, like CORBA valuetypes.best-practices
Also, CORBA Anys containing either the tk_null or tk_void typecode can be set into the work area using the CORBA interface. However, the work area specification cannot allow the J2EE implementation to return null on a lookup that retrieves these CORBA-set properties without incorrectly implying that there is no value set for the corresponding key. For example, when a user attempts to retrieve a nonexistent key from a work area, the work area service returns null to indicate that the specified key does not contain a value, implying that the key itself is not in use or does not exist. In the case where CORBA Anys contains either tk_null or tk_void, when a user requests the key associated with one of these values, the work area service returns null as expected. In this case, the key may actually exist and the work area service was simply returning the key's value of null. Therefore, when working with CORBA Anys, a user must not make any implications when a null is returned from a work area because it could mean that either there isn't a property associated with the given key, or that there is a property associated with the given key and it contains a tk_null or tk_void, for example, a null in the J2EE environment. If a J2EE application tries to retrieve CORBA-set properties that are non-serializable, or contain CORBA nulls or void references, the com.ibm.websphere.workarea.IncompatibleValue exception is raised.
Use work areas with Java's Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT)
Work areas must be used cautiously in applications that use Java's Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT). The AWT implementation is multithreaded, and work areas begun on one thread are not available on another. For example, if a program begins a work area in response to an AWT event, such as pressing a button, the work area might not be available to any other part of the application after the execution of the event completes.
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