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used to be netscape application server before that

http://www.iplanet.com/

goes to Sun's software page where Sun Java System Application Server is one of the products listed.

"Platform Edition 8.1" is the currently shipping release.

GP was talking out his ass when he said their app server was called Platform Edition 9 and no one uses it because it is new and immature.

iPlanet has been around long time, used to be available for free and was included in the Solaris media kit.

googled up a thread on a 2001 giga report that has them at 3% market share:

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?threa d_id=3362

"In August 1999, Giga published Comparison of Three EJB Application Server Solutions: IBM, BEA Systems and iPlanet (Sun/Netscape) We chose to include the iPlanet application server in that comparison because, at the time, we expected it to be a clear third in market share compared to IBM and BEA. So far, that has almost, but not quite, happened, due to iPlanet's entry into the market a year or more later than BEA and IBM, and we are projecting that iPlanet will take a 9 percent share of the 2000 market, considerably smaller than IBM and BEA. Still, among the vendors capable of moving closer to the IBM or BEA level of market share in 2001, iPlanet is one of the leaders, along with Sybase ....." -- The GIGA Group

How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if it were written in an easily-ported language like Java?

I've had to look at Ruby On Rails due to decisions made by some of my agile team members. There's a number of important things to be aware of if you or someone on your team is seriously thinking about using RoR to replace Java web apps. Be forewarned, while these are my own extremely biased opinions, they are in no way uninformed:

1.) Give up a decent IDE. The development tools are crap. Good luck trying to fire up a Ruby IDE, and set a breakpoint in WEBrick or Apache mod_ruby. You can't. Even if you hack around with the breakpoint command and include the debugger in the code you want to debug, the debugger is buggy and makes old skool commandline tools look sharp.

2.) Bet the farm that RoR only deals with you 80% problem, and your requirements won't break how it needs the ActiveRecord pattern. ActiveRecord looses it's luster once things get complex (see http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss? l=RailsHibernate).

3.) How do you like your OO style? If it's from the Jacobson camp, you're in for a treat! Objects are just dumb repeats of database tables 1st and foremost. Oh sure, you can add methods to do that OO thing if you must, but that's not the true essance. If you believe true object nature comes from behavior and not data, (ala Yordon & Coad) you won't be comfortable here.

4.) You're agile? You "get" test driven development? Give it up. RoR says you use a script. This hurts even more if you take issue with number 3 above. RoR rewards you for being database driven. Just define your scheme and all of your objects and a few controllers will get generated for you along with stub unit tests that pass by default. Just accept the required two line *Helper classes as well(yeah. TDD would have pushed me to create those).

5.) More on testing: hope you like having to rely on populating test data into your database. We kept hearing you can mock your persistance, but even some of the experts we talked to couldn't show us how (folks who are paid to work on a RoR product). Sure, folks said dependancy injection via Needle, but we couldn't find jack out about it.

6.)Speaking of database driven, that is a greenfield project you have with no legacy concerns and absolutely no complex O/R mapping requirements, you're starting RoR on right? No?!?! That's ok. just shoehorn RoR with updateable views or change your schema so that ID's are done the way ActiveRecords likes. That's no problem for your existing aps, is it?

7.)That had better be an OpenSource database you're using. It's not unheard of to "enjoy" a broken release for packages like ActiveRecord when the developers don't have access to Oracle or SQL Server. This happened to us and RoR was broken for about a week between releases in the 0.9 to 0.10 range. Yeah. That was a "release". Not CVS, not alpha or beta. Release. On the upside, we did patch ourselves, so "go OpenSource".

If the Rails fanboys want to mod me down, have at it. I stand by my overall opinion. Keep in mind, I have no issue with Ruby itself. In fact, it stands to give Java a real run for it's money. RoR on the other hand, is immature and over-hyped at best, and a rat's nest of garbage at worst.

There seems to be a lot of RoR fanatics out there. Why are they so sensitive to criticism?

A "legacy language"? Apparently it's so legacy that "modern" languages like Java are racing to implement its features. Modern C++ features like templates are really a godsend in many application development projects - check out the internal structure of ITK if you want a good example of that. :)

Of course, I may simply be feeding a troll here (a slashdotter misspelling "perl"? Come on!).

Apache Harmony has nothing to do with Gluecode. Gluecode focuses on Java application servers. It has nothing to do with J2SE implementations, and has no interest in J2SE implementations.

http://www.theserverside.com/cartoons/TalesFromThe ServerSide.tss

Scroll down to the cartoon named "The Conspiracy". It's on the right side of the page.

Mike Milinkovich said"I honestly don't know what Borland may or may not be planning. " ,please see http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?threa d_id=33488JBuilder reportedly migrating to Eclipse?

If you wanted those flame wars, you could just head over to theserverside

But on a slightly more serious note, it seems that there are moves afoot for reconciliation between EJB and JDO. There's a link with discussions here. Enjoy the reading. theserverside does have some infamous trolls and makes slashdot look like the greatest thing since sliced bread.

If you wanted those flame wars, you could just head over to theserverside

But on a slightly more serious note, it seems that there are moves afoot for reconciliation between EJB and JDO. There's a link with discussions here. Enjoy the reading. theserverside does have some infamous trolls and makes slashdot look like the greatest thing since sliced bread.

In this case, a sort of non-trivial web app, RoR seemed to be the best fit.

There are people who see the reverse being true, where Spring+Hibernate are better suited for the non-trivial apps and Ruby on Rails is best for simple CRUD apps. Heres a quote from a comparison recently done between Hibernate and Rails:

If you stick to the simple cases like single tables with a few associations, and you name your tables and columns right, Rails will likely do just fine, but for more complicated object models, Hibernate will be a better choice.

http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss? l=RailsHibernate

This article is a good look at RnR(ruby) and Hibernate (java). The author is a java developer and doesn't claim to be a ruby expert, but its interesting analysis about each one.Technical pros and cons of each without a lot of flame bait.

Patrick Peak (co-author of Hibernate Quickly) has made a comparision of Hibernate and Active Revord based on factors other than performance. Very informative.

Nothing like fanning the flames of an already hot topic between J2EE & RoR developers.

Oh, I don't know! On the pro-Java forum theserverside.com, where this article has already been covered, they're pretty open to the Ruby-on-Rails community...

(Warning: you may want to wait 361 days - crap April Fools ahead)

Nothing like fanning the flames of an already hot topic between J2EE & RoR developers.

Oh, I don't know! On the pro-Java forum theserverside.com, where this article has already been covered, they're pretty open to the Ruby-on-Rails community...

(Warning: you may want to wait 361 days - crap April Fools ahead)

RoR is a toy comparing to Hibernate and Spring. There is no serious caching, no serious transation capabilities, or messaging mechanisms. hype and buzz. Also, Check this page for a comparison of RoR and Hibernate. However, it is probably better than Php. http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss? l=RailsHibernate

I'm curious too. After all, Linux can certainly run on an IBM VM/ESA 390 and zSeries. However, perhaps the thought is that Linux is not as scalable as versions of UNIX, not that it isn't scalable at all. On the other hand, others disagree and think it's an ideal approach.

*lol* Sounds like what I'm doing. Here in my shop, UNIX operations at a Big Cap global corporation it's usualy ok by the bosses to fiddle around on company time with the unused spare UNIX hardware we have lying around (Sun E250, E220R, E420R, E450, Netras, Sun Fire's, HP Visualise, L/N/K-Class, etc) to test out new software and keep our skills and knowledge up to date.

Last month's I've been getting my hands dirty with Oracle 10i, Solaris 10 and hacking code to gain deeper knowledge on Enterprise Java stuff as J2EE, Hibernate, SOAP/WSDL, JXTA, JINI, WebServices, Virtualization/Component design and SOA architecture design, Globus and Grid architecture, etc.

The fun thing is that the screens at my desk are usualy packed with terminal windows full of Java code and running compilations as I'm working on a private project to build a complete Webshop/E-commerce site for an private upstart project I have running with a couple of friends and my co-workers/bosses dont know a slightest shit about what I'm doing, to them it looks like i'm working very hard on important things :) .. surf time on Slashdot have gone down the drain too, nowadays I mostly hangout on TheServerSide.com ;)

I'm sure we'll start seeing better standardization of XMLHttp across different browsers and more stuff like this.

This month's meeting at my local Java user's group there was an impressive demo on Ruby on Rails. The presenter built a blogging application live in front of the group, literally in 10 minutes or so. Prior to this demo I had pretty much written Ruby off "just another alternative to perl or python" but I have to say that Rails looks really impressive, enough so that I'm taking a closer look at Ruby.

One of the guys in our user's group, Chris Nelson, is building a similar framework for Java - called Trails. He also built a blogging application live during the meeting. It took him a bit longer - perhaps 15-20 minutes. It was impressive as well, although I will say that for Trails you need to know a fair amount about Hibernate and Tapestry. Realize that he's been working on this only for a few months and suddenly you see that this work is very impressive too.

Anyone interested in developing web apps might want to check these projects out - very impressive stuff!

1. http://developer.apple.com/documentation/WebObje cts/Enterprise_Objects/Introduction/chapter_2_sect ion_1.html
2. http://objectstyle.org/cayenne
3. http://www.theserverside.com/blogs/showblog.tss? id=CayenneAndHibernate
4. http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.ts s?l=Cayenne
5. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ObjectRelationalToolCompa rison

1. http://developer.apple.com/documentation/WebObje cts/Enterprise_Objects/Introduction/chapter_2_sect ion_1.html
2. http://objectstyle.org/cayenne
3. http://www.theserverside.com/blogs/showblog.tss? id=CayenneAndHibernate
4. http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.ts s?l=Cayenne
5. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ObjectRelationalToolCompa rison

• No unsigned integer type in Java -- if you need an unsigned long, you're SOL. So it's pretty difficult to code certain numerical algorithms (compression and encryption, anyone?)
• Java the language is inextricably tied to the JVM - C# is just another option for developing for .NET.

b) there are many other languages which run in the java VM (e.g. Jython, Groovy ) Some even run C# in a java vm .

*Sigh*, yes, it's true. At least Sun finally seems to be warming up to client-side Java with the partial startup optimizations coming in 1.5 and the recent JDIC project opening.

There is a much more agressive plan, though, that could lead to a Java shell to allow a much faster starting of client-side apps.

The practice, known as "astroturfing", is wildly popular on sites like Slashdot that actually let you post as "anonymous coward".

I think it is a different thing to use fake identities in order to make your product look better than it is and discrediting the critics than simply posting as anonymous. Anyone can take comments from an AC with a grain of salt, but occasional readers do not have the capability to understand that a person behind fake identity is essentially fake and astroturfing. I for one only realized what was going on on TSS only after some very specific comments from Cameron Purdy. Just one more reason to support Geronimo or Jonas instead of the "competing" offering from JBoss Group.

This is another ugly story that shows how little we need SCO and Microsoft to attack the open source community, because we are so willing to do their work for them.

First, JBoss Group betrayed the trust of what should have been a largely sympathetic community in TheServerSide with their anonymous posting campaign.

The fraud was exposed by levelheaded participants, including the submitter of this story and staff at TheServerSide.

Then, the opportunists jumped in.

Some bloggers gleefully joined the witchhunt, accusing their least favorite people of being anonymous posters, including real people, of course.

When I told one blogger that he needed to offer evidence when he accused someone of being an anonymous poster, he publically implied that I supported the posting scheme.

Several of the bloggers are themselves contributors to respected open-source projects, making this a particularly disturbing form of cannibalism.

The net result is another wedge driven into what was already an overly polarized community. No real winners here.

This is another ugly story that shows how little we need SCO and Microsoft to attack the open source community, because we are so willing to do their work for them.

First, JBoss Group betrayed the trust of what should have been a largely sympathetic community in TheServerSide with their anonymous posting campaign.

The fraud was exposed by levelheaded participants, including the submitter of this story and staff at TheServerSide.

Then, the opportunists jumped in.

Some bloggers gleefully joined the witchhunt, accusing their least favorite people of being anonymous posters, including real people, of course.

When I told one blogger that he needed to offer evidence when he accused someone of being an anonymous poster, he publically implied that I supported the posting scheme.

Several of the bloggers are themselves contributors to respected open-source projects, making this a particularly disturbing form of cannibalism.

The net result is another wedge driven into what was already an overly polarized community. No real winners here.

"Take note of Mono now and start writing Mono WinForms apps. When the Mono people get smart-client technology working, you will see a surge in linux based departmental applications."

I disagree that MONO is the ONLY solution to that problem. Try typing this into Google, and you'll see that things like FLEX, and the equivalent is were business is headed, for Internet, and Intranets. The difference between MS technologies and FLEX, is that FLEX is here, and MS is somewere down the road. Plus they aren't the only two with "solutions". So while things are still fresh, let's not propagate the Monopoly into another application space.

This,
or this,
or this

The standards argument being made

check out the demo

In Dutch, sorry
http://www.macromedia.com/resources/business/ric h_ internet_apps/">What RIA is

"Most office computer users are bean-counters, secretaries, powerpoint-using middle managers, etc. These people do NOT need 3D graphics, 4G of RAM, or 3 GHz CPUs."

I disagree very much. with that assesment.

I just saw over on TSS that they are planning to support Tomcat alongside Jetty in the future.

Good thread about this EJB stuff, apparently in reply to a very interesting critique about EJB, seems like the technology might not match the hype. Since the open source versions may still need to follow the (apparently ever moving) spec from Sun, are there even compelling reasons to study this technology?

"... like many developers, we have never been happy with Struts, and feel that there's room for improvement in MVC web frameworks. In some areas, such as its lightweight IoC container and AOP framework, Spring does have direct competition, but these are areas in which no solution has become popular. (Spring was a pioneer in these areas.)

... Spring provides a consistent way of managing business objects and encourages good practices such as programming to interfaces, rather than classes. The architectural basis of Spring is an Inversion of Control container based around the use of JavaBean properties. However, this is only part of the overall picture: Spring is unique in that it uses its IoC container as the basic building block in a comprehensive solution that addresses all architectural tiers.

... The concept behind Inversion of Control is often expressed in the Hollywood Principle: "Don't call me, I'll call you." IoC moves the responsibility for making things happen into the framework, and away from application code. Where configuration is concerned this means that while in traditional container architectures such as EJB, a component might call the container to say "where's object X, which I need to do my work", with IoC the container figures out that the component needs an X object, and provides it to it at runtime. The container does this figuring out based on method signatures (such as JavaBean properties) and, possibly, configuration data such as XML ..."

A big advantage of Velocity is that it combines a flexible templating language with ease of integration into existing applications and frameworks. Because of this, a lot of java-based web frameworks include Velocity support. Struts, WebWork, Turbine, Maverick, Spring, to name a few. Using Velocity it's also possible to roll your own web markup language with Velocity as a base, as the folks on the Roller team have done.

In addition, Velocity is more than just a web scripting language. (as opposed to JSP which is almost exclusively that). Besides using it to create web pages in a webapp, I have made Velocity templates to assist my applications in sending email and have made templates to auto-generate code to help with my object/relational mapping. There's also a translation to C# called NVelocity.

That would just be tit-for-tat. Forrester Research has already concluded that Linux/J2EE causes colon cancer

The guys at theserverside.com have shown that the CNet article puts the circumstances differently:

Green will be leaving to join another software venture, according to Sun. Green tendered his resignation several weeks ago but waited until the Microsoft agreement was settled before announcing his departure, a Sun representative said Monday. The changes were announced internally on Friday.

Cnet article
The Server Side discussion

maybe we're not looking at this

Lack of RAD tools that can compete with Microsoft's, simpler APIs, etc. Someone posted a good summary on TheServerSide.com today. Quote:
If you think that the best technology (java) is going to win the SUN vs. MS war, then you would be wrong. If you think that MS isn?t making headway into the java/web application world, again you would be wrong. This ?bury our heads in the sand? philosophy from SUN and many in the java community is just sad. It makes me sick to think that Java will only survive if SUN lets go and IBM takes over, but that?s the reality of the situation. SUN cannot build a development environment worth paying for. Examples? SWING is overly complicated. EJBs are insanely bloated and not transparent. JSP and taglibs are a joke, take too long to compile, and are prone to serious coding error. Forte for Java was terrible. JDK 1.5 is lame-o in that it supports autoboxing and generics which is mildly useful, but doesn?t support class/method metadata which is freak?in awesome in .NET. As for the VB cartoon? I work as a java developer in a company that is 99% MS VB.NET. They run massive dynamic data warehouses for various clients all using VB.NET, and I have to bow to the fact that MS has built a vastly superior development environment than anything available on the Java side.

That's the kind of stuff I'm referring to. You don't need to open-source Java to rewrite the EJB or JDO stacks or make NetBeans a decent tool. This is all happening above the JVM. Open-sourcing it won't do shit to fix these issues.

.. about a week or two ago all of java.sun.com , www.javasoft.com etc was down for more than a day. Not only did this affect people trying to surf on java-related pages. It also affected some java tools that tried to validate EJB deployment descriptors as the default DTD was located at this server. Certain default ant tasks hung since they tried to do lookup of http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/ejb-jar_1_1.dtd, and this was not available. I wonder how many application servers were affected by this downtime? It was briefly mentioned on TheServerSide.com.

It's nice to see that a Java site such as theserverside.com completely ignores Mozilla. Check it out for yourself...

Link to discussion on TheServerSide.com

A book which doesn't mention alternatives to entitybeans and raw sql sounds quite outdated.
The story of cmp/ejb is really the tale of the emperor's new clothes. Three years ago any critique voiced against this new wonder tech. was labeled as uneducated drivel. But the truth was that anyone(ok not you) forced to work in this setting, was demonstrating terrible productivity.
As anyone reading theserverside.com will acknowledge, the emperor has now officially been declared naked.
Now it's time for the trial. Let's have a book examining how and why so many clever and bright people could be fooled so badly.

So it sounds like Geronimo should be indemnifying their users from legal action, not JBoss. Why would a JBoss customer need legal protection?

Possibly because JBoss may have shot itself in the foot.

At least some of the JBoss code that Geronimo allegedly copied (see next paragraph) seems to have been derived from code under the Apache license. See the comments by Ceki Gulcu, the author of log4j.

One reason for Geronimo not offering protection is that Geronimo is an "incubator" project, so there probably aren't any clients as such who need indemnification. It's also not at all clear that Geronimo has copied JBoss code. TheServerSide has an extended discussion on the subject and the Geronimo developer's list has some forensic discussion on it.

All of this can be fixed up, of course, if the children play nice. But sending a lawyer's letter isn't a promising start. There's also enough irony in the situation to start up a smelter.

So it sounds like Geronimo should be indemnifying their users from legal action, not JBoss. Why would a JBoss customer need legal protection?

Possibly because JBoss may have shot itself in the foot.

At least some of the JBoss code that Geronimo allegedly copied (see next paragraph) seems to have been derived from code under the Apache license. See the comments by Ceki Gulcu, the author of log4j.

One reason for Geronimo not offering protection is that Geronimo is an "incubator" project, so there probably aren't any clients as such who need indemnification. It's also not at all clear that Geronimo has copied JBoss code. TheServerSide has an extended discussion on the subject and the Geronimo developer's list has some forensic discussion on it.

All of this can be fixed up, of course, if the children play nice. But sending a lawyer's letter isn't a promising start. There's also enough irony in the situation to start up a smelter.

Why not link to the Rebuttal as well? Or are you just trying to skew peoples viewpoints?

The first example in the letter is
org.jboss.logging.XLevel vs. org.apache.geronimo.core.log.XLevel
Both seem to be copied from log4j's examples.customLevel.XLevel
However, there are much more substantial allegations made here

...see this post to TheServerSide. A lot of these look like common design patterns and standard Java/J2EE naming conventions.

You can also see Jim Jagielski's response to some questions here about this issue. Sounds pretty reasonable.

Posted By: Bill Burke on October 17, 2003 @ 10:51 AM in response to Message #98961.
First, let me say that PostNuke is an excellent framework. Very early this year, we ported the JBoss website to PHP PostNuke because we loved the functionality. Unfortunately, it didn't scale one bit, even a little bit. The main culprit, I believe, was that PHP PostNuke made SQL queries for every part of the webpage on every single HTTP call. No caching what-so-ever. It brought www.jboss.org to its knees and our community was upset for a few days until we brought back the old JBoss driven website.

Since we liked Postnuke so much, we decided to start Nukes on JBoss. Which is built upon J2EE and JBoss and is now running www.jboss.org since May thanks to Nukes creator Julien Viet.

Is Java more scalable than PHP? I don't know. But Nukes on JBoss is definately orders of magnitude more scaleable than PHP PostNuke. We know from experience.

Bill

I think you could make that statement reasonably accurately about most of the services that are provided by an EJB container and EJBs. It's the framework that makes all sorts of valuable services (o/r mapping, transactional behaviour, security, re-useability, etc.) possible. That is, the EJB and container is the means to get a bunch of services cheaply rather than the end goal by itself.

Sure, I could use an o/r mapping library. And something else for transaction management. And I could get at remote objects using plain RMI, using something else for a naming service. But by the time you put all this type of stuff together yourself, you'd probably end up with something even more unweildy than EJB's at great cost. Not to mention the loss of portability/re-usability and the risks of the unknown. EJBs may look like an overblown solution, but you have to look at them in context - they're there to solve complex problems in a standardised and repeatable way. The complexity already exists in the problem space - it wasn't just added in the solution space.

To steer this at least slightly back on topic, let me use the f word again. Use EJBs just for the sake of fashion, and they look rediculous. Use them to solve the problems they were designed to solve and they are useful. Blindly following is the problem, not the particular technology or technique - be it EJB, .NET, XML, RUP, or whatever.

If you haven't already, may I recommend you take a look at Mastering EJB by Ed Roman, which you can download for free. It is an easy read, and it seems fairly well balanced. It even includes a section that addresses the very question you pose: when are EJBs genuinely called for (and when not).

Exactely. On serverside.com Drew McAuliffe summarized this very well too:

Eclipse vs Visual.NET

Here is a recent study about java and .net.
The result ?

"The Middleware Company has released a J2EE and .NET Performance case study, the latest study (an MDA productivity study was released a few weeks ago) based on their Application Server Baseline Spec. Except for the web services test, the two platforms came out mostly equal in performance. "