On Fri, 28 Jul 2000, Jeremiah Johnson wrote:
> I have been evaluating JBoss for use in development. I am very
> impressed with some of the functionality, but my impression is that it
> is not quite ready.
I would tend to agree. But I think we're making a lot of
progress. Several major bugs have been knocked out in the last week, but
several more are on the table. If I was in charge of the web site, we'd
be advertising "2.0 Alpha 2" or so...
> Here are remarks, criticisms and suggestions for improvement:
>
> 1. Documentation. The "Beginning EJB programming using jBoss
> (Windows)" is excellent. But this only covers a stateless session
> bean. Could this be expanded to show how to use all the standard
> types?
Definitely. Documentation is a priority at this point.
> 2. Stateful session beans. These do not seem to be supported. The
> "Default Stateful SessionBean" configuration is not part of the
> jboss.xml files. Can you include an example that demonstrates usage
> including Synchronization? I was trying to modify the "sb" example
> from Jonas to work with JBoss but I gave up.
This has been recently fixed, though some recent message have led
me to believe there are a few lingering issues.
> 3. Connection pools. The Minerva documentation looks very good.
> But it mentions a file called jboss.jcml which is not in the standard
> distribution, so it seems like this isn't quite integrated. Could you
> include an example of how this works with a standard database such as
> oracle?
This is caused by the mismatch between CVS version and Binary/Zip
versions. The .jcml file was in the current development builds at the
time. There should be a fresh binary available shortly which includes it.
An Oracle example will definitely be forthcoming (see Documentation,
above).
> 4. Container managed persistence. This creates a table with the same
> name as the bean. But the reality is, in most cases the table will
> already be created. How do you use a different table name than the
> bean name? The documentation mentions that this can be changed in
> "jaws.xml" but it doesn't say how.
You can manage this (table name and auto-creation) using the EJX
tool, but we need to stabilize that (and see Documentation, above).
> 5. Bean managed persistence. Examples and documentation on this area
> also need to be improved. This is related to Minerva because usually
> you would specify the "<resource-ref>" in the ejb-jar.xml file, and
> then in the bean get the datasource from the context.
See Documentation.
> 6. Transaction support. How do you change the transaction attribute
> type? In weblogic, this is set in the ejb-jar.xml file in the
> "<assembly-descriptor> <container-transaction> <trans-attribute>"
> section. I think this is also part of the dtd.
Well, the ejb-jar.xml format is standard, so if there's an option
in there, jBoss needs to support it. If you're talking about "SUPPORTS"
or "REQUIRES" then the support is there in EJX (see Documentation). If
you're talking about "SERIALIZABLE" and "REPEATABLE READ" and so on then I
don't believe that is implemented yet (but clearly should be before 2.0 is
final).
> 7. EJX. This is very nice-looking but doesn't seem to do much. You
> really need a nice gui tool to help configure these XML files, similar
> to Weblogic's GUI tool.
It actually does quite a bit, but the interface and lack of
documentation together make it a little difficult to get up to speed. We
plan to address this.
> Conclusion: At this point, JBoss isn't ready for development. I wish
> it were as I really like the concept.
Right now, I'm using beans to develop jBoss instead of vice versa.
But again, we're making progress. There are a number of people here with
a vested interested in having a working, spec-compliant, *free* EJB/J2EE
server. It will happen.
> Next I will be evaluating Orionserver, which seems very impressive but
> it isn't open-source.
>
> I would like to help with development and I will look at the different
> projects to see where I can add value.
Search Bugzilla for "bugs" associated with "Project Game Over" -
these are the areas we need help with.
> Keep up the good work.
That's the plan. Thanks for the feedback.
Aaron
> Nathan Vanderhoofven
> Senior Software Engineer
> Global Commerce Systems
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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