We are happy to announce the first beta milestone release of open source Enhydra Enterprise (EE). The prebuilt package is available immediately from http://enterprise.enhydra.org/software/downloads/index.html To join the Enhydra Enterprise mailing list, please visit: http://enterprise.enhydra.org/project/mailingLists/index.html Here's a description of EE and our goals for moving it forward: Enhydra Enterprise represents the next generation of application server. It is structured as an "operating system of the Internet," with a kernel that provides some essential facilities and a mechanism for selecting additional services to provide configurable platform functionality. We call the overall structure the Enhydra Services Architecture (ESA). ESA services can be deployed at runtime, and started on demand. This allows the deployer to choose just the services required for a particular deployment, and supports runtime upgrading of services. We aim to offer a trading post for ESA services, and we encourage the contribution of services to the community. In this milestone build we have aggregated a set of API-implementing services on top of the J2SE 1.3 platform, providing many of those APIs required by the J2EE[TM] specification: Servlet 2.2, JSP[TM] 1.1, EJB[TM] 1.1, JNDI[TM] 1.2, JDBC[TM] 2.0 with optional package, JTA[TM] 1.0.1. The configuration includes other APIs, as well as services for deployment, service initialization, and versioned library support. This sample configuration lets you write portable enterprise-scale applications. You can imagine many different configurations and platforms being built on the Enhydra Enterprise project modular architecture. For example, one collection of ESA services might be equivalent to Enhydra 3.x today (perhaps JNDI, JDBC, and Servlet/JSP Container). Another collection of services might be a communications server (perhaps JNDI, SOAP, BXXP, XML/RPC, etc). Finally, yet another might be a messaging server (perhaps JNDI, JMS, etc). When you add a new service to the EE platofrm, that new service can be available to some or all of the applications running on the platform; visibility is under your per-application control. We hope that the ability to create new cross-application services will allow for us all to benefit from radical customization of the concept of what an application server is and can be. What It Does: The beta 1 configuration of EE provides services and APIs needed by web-interfaced applications (as described abAlso, tve). It can be run on a range of deployment configurations, from standalone laptop to multi-tier multi-machine setups. It includes its own web server, or it can be connected to a third-party web server front end. EE also includes the complete Enhydra Application Framework from previous Enhydra versions (most recently Enhydra 3.1); the XMLC ver 2.0 tool for separating web page presentation design from dynamic data programming; and the Kelp toolset for building applications in third-party IDEs. There are several examples included showing how to run J2EE-style applications (including Sun's PetStore demo app) and how to write your own services. We have run this configuration on Windows NT/2000, RedHat Linux 6.1, and Solaris 2.7. The server maintains all configuration information directly in a persistent JNDI namespace for unified management and rapid system restart. Server management is provided through JMX-compatible MBeans, exposed through the Enhydra Web Console. This release begins integration of the Enhydra Authorization and Authentication Library (EAAL) which will provide JAAS-like security throughout the server, even when we incorporate J2SE1.2 support. What It Doesn't Do Yet: Some of the EE Alpha 4 codebase has not yet been ported to the new ESA-based server: most importantly, JMS is not yet available. The J2EE API set is not yet complete. Some capabilities are only partially implemented (in the security work, for example, permission checking is only partially implemented, we need more LoginModules, and the toolset is not yet started). We need to complete the J2EE set of capabilities as a proof of adequacy of the server, and add more samples as proof of flexibility. Specific current versions and limitations are listed in the Release Notes, and should be reflected in the ongoing TODO.txt list. What You Can Do: We hope the Enhydra community will lend a hand in shaking down and building up the new server; there is room for contribution in every part of the effort. As you begin to use the server, please note bugs and what needs to be made better, and tell us on the mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mail list - or fix it yourself (see the various Working Groups to discuss and coordinate your specific technical activities). When you get a new configuration working, please send an email describing your setup to the mail list, or the Documentation Working Group. As you run across the need for a service or tool, build it and see how the server handles it - and tell the community what we need to change in the Enhydra Serviecs Architecture. A Service Developer's Guide is coming from the Documentation Working Group - see http://enterprise.enhydra.org/project/workingGroups/documentationGroup/index .html. If you write or plan to write an ESA service, then please let us know about it. We want to help people write Enhydra Services, so we can see how the architecture is working out. If it looks good and adheres to the the design philosophy of Enhydra we would be happy to host your project on enhydra.org. Acknowledgements: The Enhydra development community has used the ESA with an Enhydra Multiserver Kernel to integrate code from many other leading open source projects such as Tomcat 3.2.1, Xalan and Xerces from Apache; JOnAS 2.2.7, Jonathan, and RmiJDBC from ObjectWeb; Castor from ExoLab; the Concurrent Utils package from Doug Lea; Merlot from ChannelPoint, and several W3C packages (Jigsaw and HTML Tidy). We are grateful to those organizations for placing such excellent code into open source. Wayne Stidolph [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun, J2EE, JSP, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, and JTA are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc -- David H. Young Chief Evangelist Lutris Technologies, Inc. 1200 Pacific Avenue, Suite 300 Santa Cruz, CA 95060 USA 831.460.7310; 831.471.9754 (fax) http://www.lutris.com http://www.enhydra.org =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff EJB-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
