Re: [gentoo-java] webapp-config & Java

[Renat Lumpau <rl03@gentoo.org>]

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On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 10:30:14AM +0100, Jose Gonzalez Gomez wrote:
>    Hi,

Jose,

Thanks a lot for your reply. As you observed, I'm not exactly a Java expert, so
it was exactly what I was looking for.

>    I'm not sure this is the right way to go... The standard way to deploy
>    a J2EE application (wether web or more than web, this is containing
>    EJBs and other stuff) is using an enterprise application archive. This
>    is basically a jar file with .ear extension and with its content
>    arranged in a specified way. In the case of pure web applications
>    (only servlets/JSPs) you may use directly a web archive, this is a jar
>    file with .war extension and again with its contents arranged in a
>    specified way. Some containers provide support for deploying an
>    exploded (unzipped, unjarred, whatever you call it) application, but I
>    think this is not dictated by the standard, so you can't count on
>    this. Once you deploy the application, it's up to the server to do
>    whatever it wants to run the application: it could unzip (unjar) the
>    application to a working directory, or maybe just work from the
>    provided file, as long as it publishes the web application as the
>    standard dictates.

Makes sense. I was under the impression (perhaps mistakenly) that we could
simply unjar those files and copy them over. Your explanation is much
appreciated.

>    Moreover, I'm not sure you could create virtual hosting based only on
>    J2EE servers, as I don't remember this to be included in the J2EE
>    standard, and again you can't count on it. I think the best way to do
>    this would be to provide virtual hosting using Apache and then use
>    some connector to forward requests to the corresponding J2EE server.
>    As far as I know this can be done with Tomcat, Jetty and JBoss fro
>    your list.

Noted.

>    JBoss is thought as a microkernel to which you add containers and
>    services as needed. In this case, each container (web, EJB) or service
>    can be added or removed to create an instance of the server that suits
>    your needs. JBoss comes with three configurations out of the box, one
>    with all availables services activated, one as the default
>    configuration used for most of the J2EE applications and one with a
>    minimal set of services activated. Each of them has its own directory
>    where all the necessary files for that configuration live.

Thanks.

>    I think the best bet would be to explore the API for J2EE application
>    deployment (JSR 88) ([2]http://java.sun.com/j2ee/tools/deployment/,
>    [3]http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=88&showPrint). This API intends
>    to provide a common contract every J2EE application server should
>    comply with, so you could create a generic deploy tool that would be
>    independent from the server you would be deploying to.
>    A quick googling of JSR 88 reports this link as something to take into
>    account: [4]http://cargo.codehaus.org/. This tool is being actively
>    developed by the Maven guys, and I'm pretty sure that could be used to
>    deploy web and J2EE applications to any supported server.

Thanks for the links, I'll go do my research.

>    A final note: don't know if you know the difference between a java web
>    application an a full blown J2EE application... reading your mail I
>    get the feeling that you think that J2EE is similar in complexity to a
>    PHP web application, and this isn't the case. Just in case, from the
>    four servers you mention, three of them are just web containers, this
>    is, they only support a small part of the full J2EE stack. Only JBoss
>    is a full J2EE server. I think you should add to that list a few other
>    servers that are full J2EE stacks, and quite popular, like Geronimo
>    (from Apache, [5]http://geronimo.apache.org/)

Noted. The reason I excluded Geronimo was because it's currently not in Portage.

>    HTH, best regards
>    Jose

Thanks again for a very informative email.
-- 
Renat Lumpau
all things web-apps
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