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I've got a large API ready for division into an application server, client-server architecture.

I'm hoping that at least one available Java-based application-server system with open license has progressed sufficiently that it's suitable for my use, and not too onery for me to handle.

The proposed tool-set should:

  • Provide for connection thread management. (That is, it should receive unsolicited in-bound connect requests, provide for authentication of each, and should manage dis-connections in a graceful way.)
  • Provide for continuing, stateful connection to the server - instantiation of a new instance of my API on a per-user-connection basis is perfect.
  • Provide for an authentication mechanism that can either be completely provided by the tool, and, hopefully, have an ability to provide username / password call to my API.

As all my code is Java based, an all-Java solution would be great.

I think this is all that is required. The less of other machinery, the better. I do not require a lot of thread management / connection management capability, but it's OK. What I do not need or want is anything to do with "the web." This is NOT a web-based application situation.

Could you propose Application-Server tool-sets, and for each tool-set:

  1. Identify steps for use in a situation like mine - focus on time-consuming and big-picture steps is fine.
  2. Identify key benefits of the proposed tool-set
  3. Identify key drawbacks of the proposed tool-set
  4. Give any opinions as to scale of effort of implementation and scalability of solution.

My investigations have led me to believe that Glassfish may deserve my time and attention. My own experience with JBoss suggests it's absolutely out of the question...

millimoose
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Richard T
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  • "My own experience with JBoss suggests it's absolutely out of the question" - I think JBOSS is a better choice than Glassfish. And WebLogic is better than anything. – duffymo Feb 01 '12 at 02:17
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    There, better. Still a bad question, but at least now I know why. – millimoose Feb 01 '12 at 02:21
  • @duffymo, I'd be happy to read your answers putting forward JBOSS, and/or comparison with Glassfish. – Richard T Feb 01 '12 at 02:32
  • @Inerdial, why bad q? It's not asking for argument, just sold info on valid choices and why. I've read enough of others asking similar questions to know that this topic is high in many developer's minds - and deserves to be addressed better than it has thus far. – Richard T Feb 01 '12 at 02:32
  • Honestly Richard, your question might be a good one, but it's the height of laziness. You're asking for a lot of detail. I'm a volunteer; I'd be working pretty hard to answer your four questions to the letter. It makes me tired just reading it. – duffymo Feb 01 '12 at 02:39
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    @RichardT Besides the fact that over half the question originally was your life story and other fluff, it just doesn't seem constructive. It's a question that won't attract an *answer*, as opposed to a bunch of *suggestions* or opinions. And the only solid answer to it I can imagine is a multiple-page report. (Besides the fact you don't seem to have done any research whatsoever, not even as far as to look at the Java EE stack to see if any of its component technologies fit any of your requirements.) – millimoose Feb 01 '12 at 02:39
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    @RichardT I also see red flags whenever a question asks for a list of things. If your question has non-trivial subquestions (and yours are non-trivial), it's my opinion that each of them should be a separate SO question. If they cannot be meaningfully split into separate questions, odds are your question is too broad. Additionaly, in your case, your subquestions would probably be bad SO questions even if each of them concerned a single technology you've chosen already. – millimoose Feb 01 '12 at 02:46
  • @Inerdial Well, your last comment was at least somewhat useful. I'm sure you mean well, but you are mistaken on several counts, and, keeping focused JUST on what's useful to StackOverflow, there are many hundreds of similar questions here on the same topic, many (especially the most valuable) closed as per your claims. SOMEONE should address this, even though you FALSELY claim I didnt' do my homework. SOMETIMES OPINION IS VALUABLE. And sometimes it's worth letting people ramble on their topic to people who care. You don't HAVE to read / respond to EVERY question. – Richard T Feb 01 '12 at 03:03
  • @RichardT Now you're just being petulant. I'm not spreading false accusations about you. I'm listing my reasons for why I think your question is bad and why I personally voted to close it. I'm listing them because *you asked for them*. I'd also like to remind you that closing a question requires more than one person to agree. If you feel that all of them have done so for the wrong reasons – like, say, blindly following my lead or accepting my claims without seeing if they apply to your question – feel free to ask on [meta](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/) to see if that's the case. – millimoose Feb 01 '12 at 03:21
  • @RichardT As for the other part of your complaint: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ It's as close to official policy as you're going to get, and it says, in no uncertain words, that "questions that are not answerable — discussions, debates, opinions — should be closed as subjective." Given that the spirit of the moderation rules is to maximise signal-to-noise ratio and potential usefulness to later visitors, I'd also argue that "rambling on a topic" has no place on SO either. – millimoose Feb 01 '12 at 03:30

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If you're asking for a feature-by-feature comparison, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.

I think WebLogic is the very best Java EE app server on the market; at least it was when BEA was its steward. I have not used it since Oracle bought them out, so I don't know what state it's in today.

Glassfish suffers from the same problem that all Sun products do: great specifications, lousy implementations.

I don't like JBoss's clumsy XML administration compared to the elegant admin console that WebLogic provides. But I'd prefer it to Glassfish.

I'd wonder if you really need a Java EE app server at all. I use Spring deployed on Tomcat; there's no problem in Java EE that I can't solve. Maybe you should consider Spring as an alternative to Java EE.

UPDATE: You said "roll your own." I'm not sure that I agree with this strategy, but I remembered that I should point out Netty. It's the non-blocking IO foundation for JBOSS. You might not like their app server, but you should know about Netty.

Spring won't help you write an app server. I recommend it because I believe the app server problem has been solved. Spring will help you write better applications that you can deploy on Tomcat or Spring's own version of the app server.

duffymo
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  • TY. I'm not at all sold on a JEE solution. I thought Jenni was pretty darned close to all I needed, but I could never get it up and working with the time resources available - my impression was it wasn't ready yet. Please say more about Spring - never heard of it, and this is a key reason I asked; what else is out there?! Thanks again. R – Richard T Feb 01 '12 at 02:42
  • Jenni? I think you mean Jetty, which is a lightweight servlet/JSP engine alternative to Tomcat. It's quite capable. I have no idea why you would think it isn't ready yet. It's just a servlet/JSP engine, and both of those are done. You need to learn about Spring - it's been out there for about ten years. Where have you been? http://springframework.com/ – duffymo Feb 01 '12 at 02:44
  • No, Jenni, _not_ Jetty. Jenni was an early RMI-based, SUN initiative at making an infrastructure for using RMI a bit more palatable. I gather it didn't survive. ... And look, the masters of the universe have closed the thread though there are many hundreds of questions asked on this same subject - and they close them all down. A REAL dis-service to us all. I was a user here LONG before most of these people joined - "it was real" before the police arived. -sigh- Thanks for your comments. – Richard T Feb 01 '12 at 02:54
  • Where have I been? I wasn't aware of Jenni. I did know about Jini, the Bill Joy attempt at self-discovering networked components. That's another sad story of a brilliant technology that lost out in the marketplace for a number of good reasons. You can still find it at http://java.net/projects/jini/ - looks like it has become the Apache River project. I wouldn't bother. Learn web services and Spring instead. – duffymo Feb 01 '12 at 03:00
  • TY again. Note I just gave you a thumbs up. Thanks for the pointer about Spring, I'll look into it. -smile- R – Richard T Feb 01 '12 at 03:07