[clug] Geronimo and Jboss

[Ric de France]

Michael,

2008/9/24 Michael James <michael at james.st>

> Can anyone explain to a bear-of-little-brain
>  what Geronimo and Jboss actually DO in an Apache-Tomcat server?
>
> TIA,
> michaelj
>
> PS:  Yes, I'll meekly read any FM thrown at me,
>  but I've read the websites and wikipedia and I'm no wiser.
>
> PPS:  Those sites remind me of a Doonsbury cartoon
>  where they go to buy a PC and are confronted with the salesmen
>  asking what spec they want in technical detail. Fortunately
>  they have brought a phrasebook and manage to ask,
>  "Does anyone here have user-friendly wetware?"
>  "Oh you want Fred, he's out."
>

Tomcat mainly does JSP serving. Easiest way I think of this is dynamic HTML
content via embedded Java within pages.

Geronimo, JBoss are open source J2EE (now JEE) application servers. What
this means (essentially) is they provide JSP serving, as well as stuff the
corporate enterprise use, like EJBs (reusable APIs that handle connections
and persistence and sessions), MQ connectivity APIs (for messaging - think
email for applicatoins), DB connection APIs, and other "enterprise" stuff
(like every architect's favourite buzzword - clustering). Think of it being
"on top of" Tomcat (although they may not use Tomcat to serve our the JSP
content).

They supposedly assist the developer by taking out all the hard effort of
writing their apps to be aware of messaging, DB connections, etc if they use
the set of standard Java EE APIs. I believe they also use the three tier
approach in development of applications - being it requires a presentation
layer, a logic / business layer, and a DB layer. All this gets packaged
usually in an archive called a EAR file. If you develop an application to
the correct J2EE levels, it should be deployable across any J2EE application
server that matches that level.

Commerical J2EE application servers also include BEA Weblogic, IBM
WebSphere, and Oracle Application Server.

These links may assist (but I'm guessing you've already been there):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Platform,_Enterprise_Edition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Geronimo
http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/architecture/

HTH...

...Ric
-- 
Ric de France
Ph: +61412945554 (international) or 0412945554 (Australia)
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