I'd like to show you guys something that I think may blow your minds. Firstly let me just say that I call myself a hobbyist, dont consider myself in the same league as the guru's that work on Tomcat and Apache, but I do spend an enormous amount of time playing with technology. One can almost measure how much I like a technology by how much time I stay in the mailing lists, on Postgresql I think it was 3 months, and I really like that product, on Tomcat it must be close to a year and still counting, what a fantastic product.
In our office Tomcat is now officially the delivery mechanism for everything. First I was impressed with Tomcats web abilities, then more and more with its container ability, we discovered that it can run any code, and even if it wasnt intended for the web, we started sticking applications into Tomcat anyway....that idea has now come a long way. I call it a POJO Application server, I've mentioned before that we actually popping full java applications out of browsers, but then it was very much something only I could use, messy libraries etc. What I've done now is (try) make a more professional package, and it would be really nice if the guru's just have a little read about this unbelievable servlet, and let me know what you think, if just to see how someone is using your Tomcat, in a very unusual way. As you will see, I dont like EJB containers, but I love Tomcat, and it was almost inevitable that this would happen. All I will say is that this is no ordinary application server... not unless I missed something and you can also just drop a POJO application into the others and make it remoteable. I think its a new way of looking at application servers, it feels like a discovery to me, but then who knows maybe there is something out there like this, I dont know, all I do know is that when we drop this servlet into Tomcat, we run POJO applications over the wire as if they were right their on the client machine, the same applications that will also run standalone on the machine. Its so different that I really struggled to find the relevent theory behind this technology, I think I'm close, but any pointers or corrections would be much appreciated there as well. Anyway, would just like to thank all the Tomcat'ers that have helped me out, people like Chuck, Bill, Christopher, Leon, David, Mark, Mladen... and if I forgotten you, sorry, so many, it really is the best mailing list on the web. Oh! you'll see its only certified for Tomcat ;) Only thing left to do now is see if I get Tomcat to make coffee, and clean the pool... and maybe get this to run on something fishy, you know, just in case someone needs a real application server ;) Thanks http://coolharbor.100free.com/index.htm Johnny
