Hi Alexis,
> does ease-of-use equate to documentation or is there
> more to it?
There is more to it than that. Glassfish has a hand's up on Tomcat in that it supplies a GUI editor for configuration files whereas Tomcat does not (as far as I know). On the other hand, Tomcat has relatively few configuration files to begin with so it's easier to find what you're looking for. I actually got myself lost in the Glassfish GUI a few times :)
Here are some concrete suggestions:
- Review all exception messages for the points mentioned in the following blog (NOTE: I am not the author of this blog and I'm sorry that the post is quite rude but he brings up very good points!):
http://spatula.net/blog/2006/11/attention-toplink-authors.html
1) Context
2) Clarity
3) Detail
4) Action-ability
- Simplify the administration GUI if at all possible. I don't have any concrete suggestions here exception to note that the GUI is quite large and it's possible to get lost in all that detail.
- Improve documentation to focus less on theory, more on practice. Very often I see theoretical discussions that are not followed up by concrete examples of what you mean. For example, "in order to write a custom realm you need to ..." is nice but you should provide the source-code for a sample custom realm.
- The Prelude v3 documentation contains some incorrect content that only makes sense for v2. For example, writing digest custom realms is no longer the same as it was in v2 but this isn't discussed at all in the documentation the last time I checked.
> re-footprint/startup-time, are you comparing v2 or v3 to Tomcat?
v3 is definitely better, but still falls short of Tomcat by an order of magnitude. Jetty is even better. Another thing that doesn't help is the huge amount of clutter in Glassfish's output on startup. I don't know understand half the stuff that it's talking about and that's a problem. It seems to me that end-users just want to see two things on startup:
1) progress bar (i.e. percentage done)
2) indication of whether their operation succeeded or failed (i.e. briefly list all loaded webapps and any error messages if a problem occurred)
Gili
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