Re: your current Geronimo evaluation

[David Jencks]

On Mar 5, 2009, at 2:44 AM, Aldian_00 wrote:

Ok thank you very much to both of you. I am sorry if I have been  
unclear. I
wil now give some more explanations.

My company owns a Network Management System. We plan to developp a  
NGOSS
(Next Generation Operations Support System). It will be interfaced  
on front
end with a few client Web Browsers or desktop applications, and on  
back end
with the NMS using load balancing. We actually plan to implement  
only a few
features, but in the end it might become a very big software. So  
when I ask
if it is easy, it is because at the end many persons in our  
developpement
team will have to migrate from the old technologies they are currently
working on to this new one, and we don't want to loose too much time  
with
the complexities of the system.

In consequence of the fact many parts of software will come from many
different person, our deployment plans will probably be really  
complex ones,
so if you say it is inadequate on geronimo, we might consider using  
another
one, what do you think?

I think you will have the best results thus:
use maven for your build system. Set up a nexus instance to manage  
company-wide released code distribution.  Maven can be extremely  
annoying sometimes but its the only solution I know of that provides  
any real support for managing development of large projects with  
managed code exchange between components.

 Use geronimo for your app server and assembling your application  
bits into geronimo plugins. push them to the nexus repo, and assemble  
custom servers for the various test and production scenarios you  
need.  Basically this means you can use maven to manage the complexity  
of your component interdependencies.

This approach is a lot easier on trunk (2.2-SNAPSHOT) but can be done  
with released versions of geronimo.  In trunk we are starting to use  
it in several places to assemble special purpose servers to test  
particular subsystems.  For instance, the activemq and monitoring bits  
have custom servers.

This isn't documented as well as I'd like.  There's a little bit of  
documentation here:  http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDOC22/assembling-a-server-using-maven.html

Hope this helps and please ask as many questions as you'd like :-)  I  
think the whole idea of using maven to attach the server bits needed  
to your application to assemble a server is rather new and we could  
certainly use advice from large projects on how to improve our  
implementation.

thanks
david jencks



best regards

Aldian





Xasima Xirohata wrote:

Boring note.

I have a little remark on the "easy" word in your test questions. I
think that this word DOES specify the aim of the comparing, so your
tests may be named as "the best server to start for newbie/common
task"-competition. But it's not very good to perform comparing ONLY
for newbies or for common projects.

EASY TO INSTALL
For example, the "easy to install"-test supposes "is it easy to
install geronimo for regular needs". Yeap, it's easy. But nothing too
specific (or extreme) in comparing with the installation of other
products I think. Moreover, I would never take into account the
'simplicity of installation' since no something complex occurs in any
of them if no troubles start.

But just imagine, that some ports (RMI/services) are already busy,  
you
has misplaced your java-environment installation, you want to upgrade
server or specific parts, and so on. If it occurs I insist that, for
example, geronimo is much easy to tune or fix than ... (i can't
compare with jboss or glassfish now, so put what i know) ..regular  
IBM
WebSphere (not the community edition).

As for me, all servers are easy to install in normal circumstances,
but i don't know how easy to tune or fix JBOSS/Glassfish installation
if something goes wrong.

The next question is what actually you 're going to install easily.  
If
it's just common out-of-box server, it's not the problem for any of
them. But if you're in need to bundle your server with specific
services (change the web services implementation, change any of jee
SPINE services like JMS and so on), or even cut off most services to
reduce your server up to specific configuration (we just tried to
perform this some time ago when want to ship little server to run on
customer side with derby as db), then i think you probably need to
choose geronimo.
Geronimo tends to support different projects as parts and allow easy
substitution / reducing between them. As far as I know, it's better
for this purpose than others. JBoss and Glassfish used to avoid such
of reconfiguration as REGULAR, easy process, although they has hk2/
module architectures too.

Thus, on my point of view Geronimo is more easy to tune and  
configure,
more easy to fix. But if compare just an typical installation process
with no troubles or specific reasons occurs, then probably all of  
them
(and even an IBM WebSphere) do this process easily.

EASY DEPLOYMENT

Geronimo allow deployment both from console, from web interface and
from IDE, although it's possible to monitor the server using maven
plugins. The same is for rest of servers (JBOSS/Glassfish). I don't
think that we need to compare which GUI is most easy to use to  
deploy.
It's interesting for me to compare the ability to manage dependencies
and services in complex projects. What's actually more easy to write
(specific plans) and use (manage): gbeans + geronimo repositories,  
hk2
+ repository, jboss and (?) osgi.

So it's not question to do simple things easy (since all of servers
comparatively simple), it's a question if it's possible to perform
complex things at all (with reasonable time or at least
well-documented).

EASY ADMINISTRATION
Is it a question to do simple administration (JMX / Deployed
Application, Memory Consumption) easily? As for me the more
interesting question is how to monitor and manage an application
server in cluster environment what we can manage / administrate. If
it's possible to easily integrate server with predefined  monitoring
service (*).

EASY  IDE INTERFACING
6 (If you don't know what to do, IDE will not help)... I will mark 10
if even you don't sure exactly what to do, IDE will assist you
COMPLETELY.

EASY DEVELOPMENT

Agree with Juergen Weber

5 (geronimo deployment plans like this one are really, really  
difficult:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/geronimo/daytrader/trunk/plans/dayTrader-db2-9.1-XA-plan.xml) 
,
the JEE standard parts are easy, the Java part of GBeans is easy,  
too.





(*) for example http://www.hyperic.com/demo/monitoring-screenshots.html

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Aldian_00 <aldian...@gmail.com>  
wrote:

Hi everybody

I am currently working on a comparative study of Jonas, Jboss,  
Glassfish,
Geronimo. For all technical questions, I already have the  
information on
the
internet, and those four are the only one application servers that  
can
meet
my needs. But I would like to know what do experienced user think  
about
their ergonomy. For each of them, I am posting the same question  
on their
respective forum. Please be honest and objective so that I can  
make a
good
comparison (even if for you Geronimo is clearly the best ;)).

About Geronimo, what evaluation (please give a mark from 1=worst to
10=best)
would you give concerning the following tests?

* easy to install
* easy deployment
* easy administration
* easy IDE interfacing
* easy developement

Feel free to comment about the others softwares if you know  
something
about
them.

Thank You very much !
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--
Best regards,
    ~ Xasima Xirohata ~



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