Re: Seeking Intrepid Adventurers with Knowledge of Java

Karl Trygve Kalleberg wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 12:10:35AM +0200, Jose Gonzalez Gomez wrote:
>
>  
>
> >   Karl,
> >
> >   I have a lot of experience with java programming, specially in the 
> > J2EE environment, so maybe I could help you in that area... anyway, I'm 
> > in the hard process of recycling myself into a linux administrator, and 
> > trying to put up a small company giving open source related services, so 
> > I don't know if I could dedicate much time to this. Anyway I'm very 
> > interested in automatic installation of J2EE applications using ebuilds 
> > (something like webapp-config) although I think it may be much more 
> > complicated than installing a php application. Is there any work going 
> > on this?
> >    
> This is exactly the problem that we want to tackle head-on in the coming
> months. It is by no means a trivial matter, so a lot of cooperation,
> prototyping and discussions will ensue.
>
> To my knowledge, there exists little of this of stuff out there for J2EE on
> Unix currently, which makes it difficult for us to copy anything else.
> Webapps-config is indeed a good source of inspiration, but I fear we may end
> up either bloating it, or having to fork it into servlet-config and
> j2ee-config or something similar.
>  
   Yes, I agree with you... anyway I heard some time ago of a JSR 
regarding a standard API for deployment of J2EE applications, I think 
this is definitely worth investigating, as it may solve half the problem 
as long as we don't mind to have a java application to take care of 
these issues.
> Also, another issue that quickly pops up is the actual packaging of the
> commerical appservers and containers. I don't think our users can expect to
> have available to them anything but open-sourced projects and perhaps the sun
> reference implementations in our tree.
>  
   I also agree with you here... commercial application servers are 
usually (always?) packaged as binary distributions, and supported in a 
few platforms (I don't see Gentoo in their list of supported platforms 
in a near future ;o) ). Anyway, as long as those servers implement the 
JSR I told you before, we could use the same tool to install J2EE 
applications that we use for open source servers. If we're able to 
achieve this, users would have the freedom to choose an open source 
server installed with an ebuild, or a commercial server with its own 
installer.
> More concretely, I think we should make a list of open-source implementations
> of the typical j2ee application stack, and package these as from-source
> ebuilds, with an eye towards interoperability.
>  
   Well, there are a few that come to mind... Tomcat, Jboss, Enhydra 
(are they still alive?) and of course Geronimo.
> This will answer one my big questions: Which critical parts of the stack are
> we missing before we start getting it all to play together?
>  
   Well, I think right now Gentoo is not missing any critical part of 
the stack. Jboss is available in an ebuild, and I think they include 
support for the whole J2EE platform. A time ago there were a certain 
trend where people created servers implementing just part of the stacks 
(Jboss started as a EJB container, Tomcat is just an JSP/Servlet 
container,...) but I think now they tend to offer the whole stack (Jboss 
now includes the whole J2EE stack, from JSP/Servlets, to EJBs, including 
JMS, JCA, web services,...)
   I have also great hope in Geronimo, the J2EE server from Apache. It 
seems they are putting a lot of effort on it, so it may become the next 
killer application in the area, as Jboss has a somewhat controversial 
renown.
> Also, if you know of any non-trivially-sized open-sourced webapps we can use
> as test-cases for deployment, please holler.
>  
   Sure... it comes to mind Open For Business (http://www.ofbiz.org/), 
Compiere (http://www.compiere.org/) or OpenCMS 
(http://www.opencms.org/). I'm sure we may find more.
> Any other inputs you have, both to the process, and technical points, don't
> hesitate to bring them on.
>  
   Well, just drop me a line whenever you need help... by the way, is 
there any other list I may subscribe where you discuss about these issues?
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