We converted over to J2EE last year for a government site. If you
visit our "public" face, you'll see what looks like an ordinary
Witango site (e.g., .taf file extensions where we are talking to our
main server), but in fact, that's all J2EE
http://intramural.nih.gov/search/
Basically the issues we ran into mainly involved coding sloppiness on
our part in the past, and getting that cleaned up. It wasn't actually
that bad for all of the TAFs/TCFs that already ran well under Witango
5.5, as the 5.5 server is pretty stringent compared to earlier versions.
However, we have run into a few "gotchas" where code that's OK on
Witango 5.5 server has a problem on J2EE.
Oh yes, and be sure to increase the amount of memory allocated to
Java / JVM on your servers! The default was way too low for us on our
servers.
Many of the gotcha's will get caught if you remember to run the
syntax checker, to be fair. There are just a few areas where the
syntax checker doesn't catch things, and J2EE isn't happy.
Recommendations:
Quoting is good, very very good. The more quoting the better.
That is, this is bad <@ifequal this that>whatever</@if> or
<@if "<@var request $this> > <@var request $that>">whatever</@if>
This is good <@ifequal "this" "that">whatever</@if> or <@if "
'<@var request $this>' > '<@var request $that>' ">whatever</@if>
In filter statements you must virtually ALWAYS quote the subject
of the expression or things will not work as you expect.
<@filter array='request$this' expr='#1 != whatever'>
will tend to fail
<@filter array='request$this' expr='#1 != "whatever" '>
should be just fine
And everything absolutely MUST be scoped.
It is VERY portable. We've used three different J2EE servers (working
on speed and reliability and other features of the servers), and the
switch has always been a no-brainer).
We develop and test with Witango server (developer version of the
server). We then test on a testbed server (running the small business
version of the Witango server), and then on J2EE running on the
testbed server. And then we deploy to a J2EE production server.
Now that we have some months of experience, coding is far less of an
issue, and we are really happy with the reliability (rock solid) and
the speed boost (impressive, though 5.5 server is no slouch).
The biggest issue we have run into is that if you are running Tomcat
or JBoss and you make a change to a TAF or TCF, if you post a changed
class file for these, you have to restart the J2EE server and your
users' variables are lost. (We're contemplating a move to Resin, but
the issue with that is that it automatically restarts if you post any
changed class file, so that's a problem... at least with Tomcat or
JBoss you can keep adding changed class files until you're ready and
then restart.) Admittedly, this is OUR problem, because we have bugs
- I know no-one else has this problem... 8)
On Sep 6, 2005, at 10:06 PM, Jeff Bohmer wrote:
Hello everyone,
My company is considering moving a Witango site to a J2EE app
server, using the 'compile to J2EE' features of the Dev Studio and
Runtime libs. The site uses TAF files, <@INCLUDE> files containing
meta tags, and connects to a PostgreSQL data source (for which JDBC
drivers are available). No TCF files, JavaBeans or COM objects.
What kinds of problems have you run into with moving an existing
Witango site from the Witango app server to a J2EE server? How
much re-coding has it taken?
What J2EE server(s) do you use for development and deployment? Can
you comment on the relative speed, stability, ease of
administration of each?
Overall, what are the benefits and drawbacks of compiling to J2EE?
Thanks,
- Jeff
--
Jeff Bohmer
VisionLink, Inc.
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