Offering 'services' between multiple Ears deployed on the same server

Question

Situation:

I have multiple encapsulated web applications (e.g. a forum, a blog, a user profile, etc.) that are each deployed in their own .ear file.

These can each work as a standalone but do offer enhanced functionality (e.g. the user profile displaying a list of blog entries made by this user).

Now to get this list of entries the user profile app would have to request it from the blog app by employing a service call and parsing the answer.

Question: Are there any technologies that allow me to implement such a service so it is only accessible from application instances running on the same machine? (Besides using sockets)

Bonus: What about limiting to application instances running in the same server container (e.g. Tomcat instance)?

Answer 1

You can use an embedded message broker, e.g. ActiveMQ. With ActiveMQ, if you only configure vm-connectors, it is only accessible from within the same VM. Here is the documentation that applies to embedding ActiveMQ into Tomcat, but I would think that you can use it as the basis to integrate it with the EE container of your choice. Most likely you can find documentation for your container, too.