Java app servers

[pmorelli]

A cool project would be to integrate Java app servers w/ os x server…

Panther looks like it’s including jboss, but I’d be interested in some other app servers:

Open source:

• Objectweb Jonas http://jonas.objectweb.org
  OpenEJB

Commercial:

• BEA Weblogic
  IBM Websphere
  Oracle
  Ironflare Orion

It would be nice if we could get these to replace jboss, with OS X management GUI integration.

Wonder if Panther uses JMX to interact with java servers? Would make this a lot easier…

Also, some benchmarks (at least from the products that allow it) would be cool. I’d love to see how a dual G5 stacks up against dual Intel linux server…

Further projects could look at different clustering setups.

[pmorelli]

Sorry it took a while for me to respond, I was on vacation…

Well, I’m not religiously against it, and it is the biggest, by far, free app server out there. I don’t want to take anything away from it, and the impressive tech they’ve managed to build. Plus, apple will already be including it in os x server, so it will be the default app server.

I will summarize my reservations about jboss, and why I’d like some alternatives, if possible.

1. Documentation. Jboss’ sucks. It’s not complete, not updated, and I find it difficult to peruse. This includes its “for purchase” docs, which my company bought. People are very friendly on their forums; however, this is no guarantee your questions will be answered, and I hesitate to rely on it. On the other hand, Jonas has professional grade documentation, and excellent tutorials, and they keep it updated with every release. Weblogic and the other commercial servers have very good docs as well. This may not matter as much to some people, but I get sick of hunting through xml files for undocumented settings.

2. Religion. Way too much emotion from some jboss people. Almost as bad as mac people. ;o)

3. GPL. My company doesn’t want us to use GPL stuff if we can help it. Not usually an issue, but I’d rather not deal with it. Is my JCA adapter/JMS provider/JDBC cache I just added GPLed? Who knows? It takes 3 weeks for lawyers to deal with it. On a good day.

4. Enterprise readiness. This will start a flame war for sure. Fact is, though, you’re running weblogic or websphere, prob on solaris, hitting an oracle back end if you’re playing with big iron. I’m not saying jboss doesn’t have a place, and in fact, we’re considering using it for some nice cheap async processing engines, but the main queues are on a nice fat weblogic cluster. Might change in a year or two, but for now, those are the facts. I’d like to be able to have the option of using xserves as my big iron. they’re really nice servers.

I don’t want to seem like I’m bashing jboss. It’s a good fast java app server. There are others though. ;o) I like the direction mac os x server is going, as its becoming more and more attractive to enterprise/corporate users. Just the other day, my boss asked me to include xserves in a hardware eval! Without my prompting! I’d like to continue this trend, and we need good knowledge on deploying other app servers, in my opinion. There are all sorts of intricacies in deploying these beasts. For example, weblogic has several native libraries for the platforms it deploys on. Hell, it might not even be offered on os x…

Anyway, it’s just an idea ;o) I think there’s a dearth of java related info for the mac, especially on the server side, and I think it’s a nice idea for an ongoing series of articles. I’ll even help write some, if needed.

–pete

[pmorelli]

Well, favorite is such a loaded word ;o)

For the commercial servers, I think weblogic and websphere are the top two, and I’d prefer weblogic. Don’t know if it’ll run on os x, though. These both cost quite a bit, even their dev versions, though that should come down soon…

If you’re going for free, I’d choose Jonas, from Objectweb. Pretty close feature set to JBOSS, and good docs.

–pete

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