On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, at 08:31 am, Vikram Goyal wrote:
Hi Greg and others,
My understanding is that the initial idea of Geronimo was to develop a world
class J2EE compatible container, separate from the exisitng Apache projects,
with two main goals:
a.. integration of various existing and new code bases into a J2EE stack,
with those codebases existing both inside and outside of the project
b.. certification of the J2EE stack
An easy interpretation of these goals (specifically the first one) is that
if an existing technology supports the components of the stack then it
should be integrated without having to develop is from scratch. This leads
me to believe that the sole aim of this project is to bring together
technologies rather than provide implementations, which I believe should
really have been the aim.
Not quite. There is plenty of software we can reuse to make the J2EE stack - however there's still lots of new stuff we need to do and lots of integration code required.
A <b>complete</b> J2EE certified server and a fully modular J2EE stack would
be incomplete without an implementation of the servlet engine.
Sure.
Even if an
existing servlet engine can be plugged in behind the scenes it is breaking
the notion of a complete J2EE certified server.
Why? Why can't a J2EE server be modular and support pluggable service providers. There are various Servlet container implementations to choose from, various JMS providers etc.
If the end user can take the
servlet engine out (presumably, after all the servlet engine is modular and
pluggable), the J2EE certified server is NOT a J2EE server.
I don't follow your logic. Being modular is good. Being able to just use a servlet container outside of Geroniom if thats what you want is a good thing. However Geronimo will always have a servlet container inside it, unless a user really wants to disable it in their specific deployment configuration.
Services drop into Geronimo, so a user could create a Geornimo distribution which only includes web services + JTA + JMS. However the certified distribution of Geronimo will have the entire J2EE stack.
I am not sure what you would call it, a Web services engine?, an EJB container?
J2EE server?
Besides, there are several complexities with the plugging in other servlet
containers. I am not sure how many of you have ever tried to integrate
Tomcat with Apache or tried to embed Tomcat as part of an application.
The folks around here are well aware of Tomcat & Jetty and integrating them into JBoss
The
embedding makes the control pass on to another applications space, in which
we have no control or say. Ideally that should be the case, after all that
is what OO is all about. However, an integrated engine, developed within the
confines of the complete J2EE engine has a better likelihood of being
robust, modular and performing better.
Thats pretty much what we're doing. Its just we don't need to write a servlet engine from scratch - we can just reuse the existing ones. There's plenty of other stuff for us to do :)
James ------- http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/
