Hi,
I have a small suggestion for the team building Glassfish releases.
A small description of what I do:
As part of my work I use VMWare on a Mac. This has some drawbacks and some advantages. One advantage is that I can set up a new environment whenever I get to work in a different company -- all you need is a preliminary setup (with Java, databases, servers, etc) and then you start installing the typical company stuff. It's most useful with Windows (ahem), personally for home use I run Gentoo on VMWare.
The suggestion:
The setup described above allows me to put most of the popular servers (Tomcat, JBoss, etc) on a Mac disk, and share this directory to any VMWare environment I set up. This way, I can use the same server, libraries, database on Windows, Linux etc, etc, regardless of the OS I run. I do not have to install the same stuff each time I go working to a new company.
This works, except for Glassfish. I think something could be done about it, and I believe it is not much work when you assemble a new Glassfish release.
The problem in more detail:
Installing Glassfish is AFAIK impossible on a Mac. But I installed a Linux Glassfish on a Gentoo OS in VMWare. If I install it locally, everything works. But as I mentioned above, I migrate databases, servers to a Mac disk (e.g. a directory outside of the given OS I run, but visible to it (= shared from the hosting Mac system)) so that any OS installation might see it.
So ...if I am not forced to installing locally, I try to avoid it.
So.. I try to install Glassfish on a shareable directory. Things get ugly. First of all - it is partly a Mac problem -- when you install things on a Shared Mac directory from within an OS (like Gentoo or Windows) you get into problems pretty quick if the installation creates new directories (they get "File.IOException: permission denied" messages). You can avoid this problem by installing locally, packaging the file and unpackaging the whole file in the Mac directory (Mac creators believe that if you have "rwx" access to a directory you don't automatically have "rwx" access to subdirectories, ahem). I did this with Glassfish, and had a look at asenv.conf and asadmin itself. Both of these files contain entries related to the installation (e.g. the paths to a Java JDK). I swtiched those to point to new directories, crossed my fingers and ran asadmin. All directories/files within the new Glassfish directory had the maximum "777" permissions. And the execution of asadmin failed.!
What would I suggest:
Editing of asadmin, asenv.conf should allow the migration of a Glassfish installation to a new directory. If you change the location of a Glassfish installation and edit the paths in asadmin, asenv.conf -- then you should be able to run Glassfish with no problems. Otherwise a Glassfish installation is not really scalable.
Final words:
I am not a very big expert in Glassfish. I do not believe that a developer should know all the arcane data an administrator should. So I hope there isn't some simple mistake I made here. If I did, please point me in the right direction.
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