Geronimo! Part 1: The J2EE 1.4 Engine That Could

An anonymous reader writes "Java-based open source development has come a long way since the early days of developers sharing GUI libraries. Geronimo is a large-scale project attempting to create a certified J2EE 1.4 server based on existing open source components. Take a tour through the Geronimo maze with Sing Li as your guide. Gluecode Software CTO and principal Geronimo contributor Jeremy Boynes shares his perspective on Geronimo and go here to learn how to use the new Eclipse plug-in for Apache Geronimo."

Comments

Re:what about tomcat?

[s100w]

Tomcat is just a servlet container. A J2EE-compliant app server like Geronimo is a servlet container + a whole lot more.

Granted, most people only use their app server as a servlet container.

Those people would be better off with just Tomcat or Jetty. Interesting/nice to see Jetty included with Geronimo.

JOnAS

[Joff_NZ]

JOnAS is our there... free, and LGPL'ed and is already J2EE 1.4 certified

It's also not too bad at all...

Re:How about Java 1.5?

[chochos]

for compelling reasons, how about:

• a large user and developer base, which means better support. Your framework is only used by your company, so only you can support it.
• Struts is a popular framework, so you can hire developers who already know it instead of having to train them on the use of your own propietary one. This one is even a selling point to the PHB's, since they know that no training time means the newbies can start being productive sooner.
• It's open source, so if you ever leave your current job and go work somewhere else, you can take that knowledge with you, and use it anywhere else. The knowledge you have about this propietary framework will be useless since it's the company's property (yes, even if you wrote it, since it was on the company's time, unless you had a written agreement saying otherwise)

I'm not even a Struts advocate, I prefer Tapestry myself. But I once worked at a company where we (mostly I) developed a framework for web applications and guess what... I can't use it now that I don't work there. Oh and I had to keep training people on the use of the framework. And I was the only one giving support to the other developers. And these guys licensed said framework to every customer they had where it was used for their projects, and I got nothing for it besides my paycheck.
If I had worked on improving Tapestry or Struts or something like that, instead of concocting a propietary framework, I would still have access to that work today, it wouldn't have gone to waste. That's yet another reason why Open Source is good and one of the reasons I like most (being a developer, I take advantage of a lot of open source frameworks that mainly benefit the developer and contribute back whenever I can, either by promoting said frameworks or sending patches, etc).

Oh and that propietary framework I wrote? I don't think anyone even uses it anymore. Few people really understood how it worked and most of them have also left that company, so now they're left with a useless product, they can't support or upgrade the projects written with that framework. I know that they have even contracted ex-employees for maintenance on projects they worked on while being there... so in the end it wasn't even a good thing for the company either. The use of an open framework would have meant they could hire anyone who knows it for upgrades, maintenance, bug fixes, etc.