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David Forslund wrote: | The application doesn't need much in the way of J2EE support. It only needs JSP support. | Thanks David and Don for the information.
Let me give some more perspective on why I asked the question.
I am responsible for running (operations) a JSP server farm. We currently use Resin, but we used to use Tomcat back in the 3.X release days. What we have found is that our particular installation of the server, ranging from java release levels, to additional jar's to where we locate the software and finally to configuration directives gradually evolves over time into something quite specific to this server environment. Recently we ran into seemingly intractable robustness problems and I lobbied to switch to another JSP server, JBOSS. It turned out that the labor involved in such a switch was so great that we ended up investing significant time in problem solving. Thanks to a great staff and java 1.5, we think we solved the problem.
Another data point: We have purchased two commercially supported applications based on JSP server technology. IN both cases, it became highly problematical to try to adapt those applications to our JSP server world. We ended up installing those applications according to how their developers packaged the system, including the supported install of the JSP engine.
What that ended up doing is having my group, i.e. server operations, treating the application installed on a dedicated server as if it was a vendor supplied blackbox, i.e. an appliance.
Since my long range strategy is to adopt appliance solutions where ever possible this should be acceptable. An issue arises, however, in that this model does not scale well unless one makes the move away from commodity hardware! By that, I mean that the installation, on-going physical operation and management of these appliances can get to be a problem in it's own right!
And that leads me back to what the hardware vendors will supply and support as the starting point for any application bundling effort. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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