I did say "ideally".
I guess I'll turn the question around then -- what are the good examples of a Java EE-based PaaS today? I know of Amazon Beanstalk, are there any others?
--
Jevgeni Kabanov
Founder & CTO of ZeroTurnaround
http://twitter.com/ekabanov
On Friday, June 17, 2011 at 0:54 , Bill Shannon wrote:
> Jevgeni Kabanov wrote on 06/15/2011 11:21 AM:
> > I'm still catching up with the reading and some research, but here are in no
> > particular order some things I'd ideally want to see from this:
> > 1. App servers should abandon the notion that they are only managed by their own
> > consoles. Their should be a generic way to start/stop/deploy/etc. I haven't
> > looked into JSR-77 yet, maybe that's the one. But I'd propose to standardize on
> > the command line instead of the Java API, which is hugely cumbersome in a
> > heterogenous environment the apps commonly live in.
>
> We tried to standardize some of this in JSR-77 and JSR-88. They have not been
> a success. While we'd like to do more here, it's a tremendous amount of
> effort, and not something we're planning to do for EE 7.
>
> > 2. Also, please let me pass parameters to the JVM, e.g. managing Glassfish
> > through scripts is impossible. Being able to tune the app server and its JVM
> > centrally is a must for the cloud.
>
> To make standardizing this really useful, we'd want standardized JVM
> parameters. There are none. A standardized way to pass non-standard
> parameters isn't as interesting, and encourages non-portable applications.
>
> Passing JVM parameters with an application when you deploy the application
> to the cloud assumes a certain deployment model (one application per JVM)
> that we're unlikely to require.
>
> If people think there's value in standardizing a way to pass non-standard
> JVM parameters, with no requirement that the application server do anything
> with them, I suppose we could consider that.
>
> Oh, and you *can* set JVM parameters for GlassFish using a script so I'm
> not sure what your issue is there.
>
> > 3. REST API layered over JMX API for deployment, configuration management and
> > app management. Can't stress that enough.
>
> JSR-77 is an EJB API for management. It gave us a standardized protocol
> for management that wasn't Java specific. Still, JMX proved more popular.
> There is still no cross-platform standardized protocol for management
> using JMX. We've been asking for years for a Web Services / SOAP mapping
> for JMX. Today, using a REST-based protocol might be a better choice.
>
> Again, this is a ton of work that we won't be able to do for EE 7.
>
> > 4. A jvm-instance-per-app model (better called process per app model) for app
> > servers as an alternative to the current classloader per app model and way to
> > manage those apps. At least as an option to be standardized on down the line.
>
> I don't think we'll standardize this, but this is definitely one implementation
> strategy that we intend to allow.
>
> > 5. Session API/SPI (probably through the same JMX/REST combination) that allows
> > to migrate data without relying on the app server and also keep session in the
> > super-effective datagrids/caches.
>
> I'm not sure I understand your use case here.
>
> Our focus has been on APIs that applications need. Applications shouldn't
> be migrating data.
>
> In some cases we've provided SPIs that allow servers to be extended, or
> allow multiple implementations of a facility to be provided independently
> of a server vendor. An SPI to allow pluggability of session state
> storage and migration mechanisms might be interesting.
>
> > 6. Oh, and an API for provisioning app servers, though that's probably too much
> > to expect :)
> >
> > Generally I think the main thing PaaS support requires is to expose a bunch of
> > scripting APIs and make the app server consoles to be consumers of the APIs the
> > underlying server exposes. This will create a great ecosystem to complement the
> > existing tooling instead of requiring app servers to catch up one by one.
>
> That's not our current plan.
>
> We're trying to enable application server vendors to provide a full cloud
> platform.
>
> We're not trying to turn application servers into a component that someone
> else would use to construct a full cloud platform.