Chris--
Ironically, Frank's problems provide a great example of what full-bore app
servers provide over Tomcat or other web (or servlet) containers. The only
reason that Fedora bundles ActiveMQ libraries is to support JMS messaging,
which is a service that app servers provide by spec, but which Tomcat does not.
In other words, if Fedora had historically been designed to run in an app
server (and not a web container) Frank would not likely be having that
particular problem.
Of course, a whole host of other problems would have been made available. {grin}
In fact, to my knowledge, JMS is the only technology that would be available in
an app server but lacking from a web container in which Fedora has immediate
interest. Others (e.g. EJB) are not currently of interest and I don't know that
they ever would be-- but I welcome correction there.
I think constructing separate versions of the application (at build or install)
for separate containers is a combinatorial nightmare waiting to happen. Testing
alone could explode. It also goes very much against the grain of JEE as a
specified practice. An application that cannot run in multiple spec-compliant
containers usually demonstrates problems with the codebase (e.g. designing too
much to implementation instead of to contract, building independent versions of
services that ought to be contracted from the container, etc.).
I'd like to suggest a different route, one already formally endorsed by Fedora.
Moving the application to the OSGi framework will enable it to be deployed in
almost any container (including many totally off the JEE specs), helped by the
clean, stringent OSGi classloading architecture. It's an enormous amount of
work to be done, certainly, but I'd suggest that it will be work of more
lasting benefit than constructing in-project machinery to support multiple
containers.
In the meantime, perhaps we can get some kind of a straw poll on the users-list
of sites either deploying or wanting to deploy Fedora to something other than
Tomcat or Jetty? There might be some simple ways to help the community support
itself without investing a lot of committer time in the effort. If one site has
good schemes for this kind of deployment that aren't too onerous, that might be
very helpful to start.
---
A. Soroka
Online Library Environment
the University of Virginia Library
On Aug 12, 2011, at 9:31 AM, Chris Wilper wrote:
> As for myself, I don't have experience with JBoss or other app servers in
> production deployments. I know their stated value propositions, but I don't
> really appreciate first-hand the value they provide over simpler Tomcat or
> Jetty-based deployments.
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