Hi all,
we are currently investigating alternatives to JBoss AS. Glassfish looks
interesting, so far, but, I could not quite make out whether Glassfish
features an equivalent to JBoss SARs, we absolutely need. In case you
are not familiar with SARs, here's the bottom line:
* SARs are similar to EARs in that they present a self-contained
application including descriptors, Code and, possibly libraries.
* In contrast to EARs, SARs don't deploy enterprise applications (Web
Applications, EJBs), but services.
* Services are quite simply MBeans implementing a service interface that
lets the service hook into the container life-cycle (start/stop) along
with a descriptor detailing dependencies etc.
I understand that Glassfish features deployment of plain-old MBeans as
well as Lifecycle Modules. However, as I understand it, both can't quite
do what JBoss SARs can:
* Glassfish MBeans can't be packaged like a SAR, i.e. in a
self-contaiend module to be deployed like other applications.
* Additionally, they lack the life-cycle hooks.
* Lifecycle Modules, on the other hand, are closer to SARs in that they
can be deployed in a self-contained (?) fashion, however, they have two
drawbacks:
** They require a server-restart upon deployment
** There doesn't seem to be a mechanism to specify module dependencies.
I may be wrong about some or all of those observations, so please let me
know if this is the case. Anyway, to make things a bit clearer, here is
our use case:
* Deploy services other than J2EE apps. Think, for example,
implementations of classic UNIX services like NFS, TFTP etc.
* We would like to be able to just drop the service packages somewhere
for deployment.
* They should be self-contained so that they can use their own isolated
class loader, in order to overcome possible library version conflicts.
* Of course we need the life-cycle hooks.
* Oh, and did I mention: hot (re-) deployment would be great...
From the demos it seems like v3 is just what we're looking for, but can
v2 do that as well?
Thanks
Joerg Henne
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