Geronimo 1.0 Milestone Build M1 Released

Dain Sundstrom writes "The Geronimo team is pleased to announce the availability of our first milestone release, 1.0 M1. M1 marks the first of many milestone releases to come. This milestone integrates the main container components: Geronimo, MX4J, Jetty, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ. It has been amazing to see our communities come together and show such strong support for Apache Geronimo. There is still much work to be done on this integration and we look forward to fostering more collaboration between our projects to create an even more unified M2. As this is our first release and bound to draw a lot of attention, we have put together a thorough set of release notes which detail the current state of Geronimo. We advise that this is simply a milestone release and is not for general use, nor is it any indication of a final release. Our goal with this release is to start out slowly with a base set of functionality and gather some initial feedback that we can incorporate into future milestones."

Comments

Ok great

[krisp]

Nice, but what exactly does it DO? Thanks for all the information about how big a milestone it is, but don't you think some information on what it is would be useful?

Re:Ok great

[LowneWulf]

According to Apache's incubator project listing, it's a "J2EE container".

Though the descriptive article link to a wiki saying nothing but "LOL JEWS" sure didn't clarify that for me. Hope their J2EE implementation is more secure than their website.

Re:Ok great

[chocobot]

whatever it is, it RULES!

Re:Ok great

[pete-classic]

Try here.

Lovely to see the /. trolls branching out like that. :-/

-Peter

Re:Ok great

[KillerLoop]

It's an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) container, where you can deploy enterprise archives and ... well, run them.

Think Tomcat, which is a container for web applications. Geronimo runs along the same vein but for EJB's. In fact it incorporates a Servlet/Web/JSP container of its own, namely Jetty.

And yes, it's Java stuff.

Re:Ok great

[the MaD HuNGaRIaN]

"In fact it incorporates a Servlet/Web/JSP container of its own, namely Jetty."

Just for clarification, Jetty was written by Greg Wilkins and is maintained by him and MortBay Consulting. It uses jasper as it's JSP engine, but is otherwise much faster than Tomcat. So to say Jetty is part of the Geronimo project is sort of misleading--as it is it's own entity. But that's the nice thing about good design--these things are modular.

Re:Ok great

[mabinogi]

That's not really accurate.

It's a J2EE container / application server, which means that yes it'll host EJBs but EJB is not it's sole purpose.

J2EE application servers provide EJB, JMS, Servlet/JSP, Web Services, JNDI for service and resource location, and a whole heap of other standard APIs.

Geronimo takes the approach of integrating a whole heap of existing apache licensed components into the one cohesive server.

A lot of people think that EJB is all there is to J2EE, but it's not - in fact it's the least important component, the one that should be avoided completely unless you really know you need it.

It's the ASF's J2EE Container

[SwansonMarpalum]

Given that the ASF has wider industry support and several members of Sun, it may even get certified. This would be potentially bad news for JBoss.

Hibernate?

[jlrobins_uncc]

I wonder if it will ever be able to contain / integrate hibernate, or will that be verboten by JBoss LLC?

Word around the campfire says it requires far fewer contortions than CMP beans.

Congrats to both JBoss and Geronimo. May they both provide middleware containers that don't suck.

Re:Hibernate?

[BuddieFox]

You can use Hibernate in you applications and deploy it on Geronimo to your hearts content. Hibernate is application server neutral and doesnt even require an application server! You can use it in your standalone apps as well. And I would definitely recommend using Hibernate, I have pushed it into several big commercial projects and its worked like a charm. for more info on Hibernate.

Re:Hibernate?

[joib]

I don't think that will happen, since Hibernate is LGPL and Geronimo is ASL.

That being said, Hibernate combined with Spring will do 99% of what EJB is used for, with a significantly reduced amount of pain.

Annoying

[N8F8]

Dear ED: Please ensure authors give brief discription of obscure projects when submitting news of obscure projects.

What is Apache Geronimo - Answer -from Apache site

[savageps91]

ripped off of the Apache Geronimo Wiki:

http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo

The Apache Software Foundation has initiated a project to develop an open source, Apache-licensed, implementation of the J2EE specification. In addition, the project is committed to certifying the implementation as J2EE compliant. This is an ambitious goal and will present a formidable challenge for the people involved, given the wide range of technologies covered by the specification. Apache Geronimo builds upon the many Java projects at the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, the project is bringing together members of the Castor, JBoss, MX4J and OpenEJB communities. We would like to extend an open invitation to everyone involved in the J2EE space, both commercial entities and talented individuals, to join the community and build a world-class J2EE implementation. The Apache Software Foundation is in a unique position to build a J2EE compliant platform. Our non-profit, charity status, and our relationship with Sun Microsystems, provides the foundation with access to the J2EE TCKs, making it possible to achieve certification. In addition, our flexible and unrestrictive licensing makes it possible for a wide variety of participants to assist in the development of Apache Geronimo, and to build their own solutions upon the platform. Apache Geronimo has been launched within the Apache Incubator.

Re:hacked?

[sakshale]

The joys of allowing fools to access a Wikki site.

Can it compete with JBoss?

[wackysootroom]

Now that JBoss has been out for quite some time and set itself up as the premiere Open Source J2EE server, how will Apache get people to try Geronimo out, especially seeing as the 1st milestone lacks many features?

Will it be Speed? Security? Ease of configuration?

Hopefully all 3. I can't wait to try it out.

Re:Hacked?

[i_am_pi]

It's a "wiki" which allows anyone to edit the text. You can see the differences between versions by clicking on the colored glasses. Bad idea to post a site that anyone can edit on the front page of slashdot.

It could be worse, they could allow image posting.

What it is ...

[jlrobins_uncc]

For those who don't read the article....

Geronimo is an attempt to produce an apache-licensed J2EE middleware stack. Another player in the JBoss realm, apache licensed as opposed to GPL backed by the JBoss commercial company.

Will end up being another postgres vs. mysql 'battle':

One with more features than the other
Different licenses
One propped up by a company

[ We're a JBoss (GPL, not LLC) / Postgres shop ourselves ]

Re:What it is ...

[Decaff]

Will end up being another postgres vs. mysql 'battle'

Not quite. J2EE is a standard (well, a set of standards). You should be able to write to a compatible subset of whatever features Geronimo and JBoss provide. If you use EJBs and message queues, these should work on both app servers.

That's an advantage of Java - it means something as a specification. Its not like databases where you can say you implement 'SQL' then provide something massively different from other systems.

Re:What it is ...

[jlrobins_uncc]

But is is just like SQL. Each EJB container vendor has their own
suite of extensions to the specs, 'cause the specs just don't let you do all that you need to do in the real world.

Differences in SQL is one of the reasons for this. EQL is a horribly constricting query language. Sure, it hides the SQL-vendor's flavoring from you, but since it gives you such a limited view of even 'standard' SQL, it has to be avoided for non-trivial queries -- either through EJB-container specifc deployment files, or even down to handcoded SQL in prepared statements at the session bean layer.

Show me a non-trivial enterprise application that sticks straight to the spec. I wish it could be done. Really. But my gut feel is that it is incomplete in parts, and way too wordy in other parts.

At least there's xdoclet.

Aweful press release.

[FreeLinux]

This press release does not clearly state what Geronimo is or does. It also makes no effort to describe what MX4J, Jetty, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ are. It does however, use the word milestone six times so one would be tempted to assume that Geronimo is some form of high-tech highway mile marker.

It is especially important when releasing a new product or a product with a new name, that the press release clearly describes the product. From the press release I have no desire to click the Geronimo link to investigate further and instead chose to add another post that is likely useless. OSS projects really need to think about the dirty word "Marketing".

ohhhhh look....

[WwWonka]

...an anonymous user changeable WIKI web page!!!!

GERONIMOOOOOOOOO!"

Irony?

[FortKnox]

Now this is irony:
Please ensure authors give brief discription

Followed by:
Real programmers don't comment!

Re:hacked?

[w42w42]

It's a wiki. The 'real' geronimo page is at http://incubator.apache.org/projects/geronimo.html

Re:Text Mirror (as of 11:33 EDT)

[diamondsw]

And that fact that this is being done by the Apache group and they couldn't publish a static web page of their own is, well, sad.

Re:why Jetty???

[Anonymous Coward]

if you search the geronimo-dev and tomcat-dev mailing list, you'll understand why. Quite a few of the committers in geronimo are from core-developers. Remember the group that left JBoss? Yeah, the same guys.

One of the developers (I won't name the individual) on geronimo claimed Tomcat wasn't modular enough. Kinda funny since JBoss embeds tomcat just fine. Geronimo holds promise. Only time will tell.

Re:why Jetty???

[sircrown]

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

Re:Mutually exclusive?

[_marshall]

As far as I know (i heard this in JBoss training, and can verify it with the current build we are using -- 3.2.3) Tomcat is bundled and is the default web container from here on out.

The new JBoss 4.0 (which is still in beta) is coming bundled w/ Tomcat 5

The Microsoft approach?

[Xipe66]

Can it be?

We advise that this is simply a milestone release and is not for general use, nor is it any indication of a final release. Our goal with this release is to start out slowly with a base set of functionality and gather some initial feedback that we can incorporate into future milestones.

Release early. Release often.

- Which not only is the Microsoft motto, it's also a very good motto that I wished more OS projects would use. Then maybe, just maybe, we would start seeing software written for users, and not as it is today, software written for the fun of writing something no matter how inconsistent and crappy (see: basically every OS project in existence except maybe the Linux kernel, Mozilla and OpenOffice).

Re:Mutually exclusive?

[liloldme]

The next 3.2.4 will also have Tomcat 5 bundled (and looks to be WAY faster than Jetty in my tests).