This posting is my understanding of iAS 6.0 and ND migration to iPlanet. I do not
speak for ND. You should always refer to ND/Sun for their official position.
One year ago I say ND 5.0 is the best application server product available. That was
base on the application server and the tool’s they provide for users to
develop
their applications. Using ND 5.0 you can develop applications quickly and
deploy
them quickly. Many ND projects were completed within 2-6 months. I stand by
my posting
and still believe that was a correct statement. I also want to give credit to
all
the ND employees who have work very hard and done a great job in developing
ND 5.x.
The strength of ND is in the spider classes, wizards and the project handling of the
studio. The server is good but not the best in areas of fail over and stability.
Going foreword Sun wants to make j2ee the standard. This means all the custom classes
that ND uses and the structure of the ND project (all those custom files)
must be
replaced. So what is left is the application server. In the past 3 years
Kiva/Netscape
server have always been considered to be the best in the industry. What they
are
not strong in are tools and custom classes. From an engineering point of view
it
is reasonable to take Kiva/Netscape server as the basis to develop the
iPlanet server
on.
For ND users you are going to like the reliability / fail over/ performance of the iAS
6.0 server.
J2ee compliant means you can take your application (one EAR file) and deploy it in any
j2ee compliant application server
In j2ee you only have standard classes that java provide you. You can also provide
your own classes or buy some utility classes from other vendors. Those
custom classes
must be optional outside the application server (you have the license to use
it outside
of the application server). The application server cannot provide you with
any custom
classes and still be j2ee compliant.
In reality this is not as simple as j2ee claim. All application server is going to
have some feature / configuration parameter that is unique to themselves. I
think
the best you can hope for is take the EAR file generated by one vendor and
run it
under some deployment wizard from the second vendor and they will ignore or
delete
custom configuration files (extra XML files) of the first vendor and then add
their
own configuration files and repackage it into one EAR file.
Still this is very good. You can take your application and deploy in another
vendor’s server.
There is a tool from NAS call NAB for project development and deployment. I have
look at some documentation and it seems reasonable. It is not as powerful as
the
ND studio but it looks like it can provide most of the basic needs. Visual
Caf� support
is planed for April or May? Beta test for the tool (iAB 6.0) is mid to late
March.
I am attending a one-day class in mid March. The best tool for iAS 6.0 is
going to
come in the summer from the Forte group. Some ND engineers are in that group
plus
some original Forte engineers.
The j2ee Specification was officially released on 12/17/99. Java Soft is in the
process
of developing test suite for j2ee. IAS 6.0 is the first product undergoing
certification.
There are a few thousand testes in this test suite. IAS 6.0 is hoping to
pass the
test in the next few weeks. Once it passes the compatibility test it will be
released
as a development release. Hopefully it will happen in March.
I am looking foreword to convert one or two simple ND projects over to iAS 6.0 in
March/April. I am going to rewrite them completely. They are administration
type
of projects and do not have a lot of java coded logics. They are mostly
developed
using the studio.
ND is working on conversion tools for more complicated ND projects. It is in the
2nd quarter of 2000 and it will convert and generate about 60-70% of the java
code.
That % depends on what you use in your project. You have two choices. You
can use
the conversion result and complete the conversion by adding what is missing.
Or
you can use that as the basis and rewrite the whole application. It is
easier to
not rewrite but it is cleaner to rewrite. But in either case the conversion
tool
will be of great help.
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