“Wondering what the future holds for Apache Geronimo? You’ve come to the right article in this series. In this installment, the renegade will explore what’s in the proverbial cards for Geronimo, including where the developers of Geronimo are taking the project, the important new features, and the improvements. Follow along, and you might be there with them for the unveiling of the next version of Apache Geronimo.”
If you don’t require all of the Java™ Enterprise Edition (Java EE) layers, and you only need to access the Web tier, you’ll be able to use Little-G (lightweight Geronimo) instead of the full Geronimo installation. Little-G weighs in at just 19MB and includes everything you need to make Web applications. You can choose between Apache Tomcat or Jetty. Little-G will be customizable by adding plug-ins, but there won’t be an administration console with this, only a command-line interface.
Geronimo is so hot, best news I’ve read in a while. the feature list is, well, like they’re reading my mind or something.
One of the things that worries me is that Geronimo according to the article doesn’t fully support java 5.
Later version of java are much faster, and are also needed for new Java EE 5 stuff allredy available in Glassfish and to some extent in JBoss.
If you do development I see little reason not to go for Sun Glassfish instead of Geronimo as this is where new things will turn up first and old things have been tested for the longest time. It is also quite fast.
Both are open source, and free to download. Both can be integrated to Apache (as they both use tomcat for the web stuff).
Late is relative.
While in a personal, wishful way, I mostly agree with you about Java 5, on a professional level I’m not so sure about it.
Everywhere I look, and I’m mostly looking at big companies and big projects, they’re still working with 1.4.2. This happens to such an extent that, on that personal level I refered to, I sometimes crave for them to update.
A lot of the industry is still very slow when receiving new versions. At least in regards to the people making the decision to update.
OTOH this is exactly the same reason why they probably don’t even know about Geronimo’s existence… Oh, well…
Industry tends to wait for new releases to stabilise, then for developer tools to catch up and stabilise (NetBeans 5.5 with JavaEE 5 support isn’t due till September for example), and then they have to plan out the migration, with an eye to supporting older projects.
The developer tools won’t be out till September, and the servers will have stabilised around Q107. Most business will probably start looking around the end of this year or the start of the next, and then probably make the switch around the middle of next year.
When you’ve got a lot of projects on the go, and more to maintain, big technology changes like this need to be managed carefully. J2ee 1.4 and Java 1.4.2 are both rock solid: that’s why they’re used. Java 5.0 has seen 6 updates since it was released nine months ago: that’s one update every 6 weeks.
Edited 2006-06-25 11:26
While our code is a mixture of jave 1.4 and Java 5 I can say the use of generics has made our code easier to read by an order of magnitude.
I am working in large scale client-server application. In my company we have the bad habit to rewrite the wheel all the time.
What I am looking for, is an open-source web service sorta thing. This is really what I need. Why? because we can script on the server (easy to maintain, easy to administrate) As for the client we can write all sorta shit app in any language, because anyway, what matter is consistency on the server side.
This has really been what I wanted the web to head to for more than 2 years and things getting very good.
Geronimo is one of the thing I was really seeing as an opportunity to do those sorta web service stuff. However if you really want to use geronimo, then you better use Java. But I do not want that. I want to be able to use a simple browser in some case for some requirement, and coding php style to serve web pages is more efficient than java. Some other time, in need to do 3D rendering (no I am not kiddin) and I want to use C++ in that case (for exemple), some other time java is just fine…
What I mean is that Genronimo doesn’t really fit in my definition of web service ready app, althought it’s what J2EE is about (correct me if I am wrong).
Actually I would prefer something less complex, something that just serve the sole purpose of replying to a service request when one arrives something like… ok I am a open source fan, so it’s gonna be hard to say… what microsoft is doing with ASP.NET+SOAP on the .NET framework. It is so easy to script the reply of a little request. And 90% of the time, you really do little request that require little of processing: typically “give me the position of that stuff”, “give me the value of that variable”…
I have been looking at PHP+SOAP for a while, but it’s still in early stage of development. And apart from other J2EE solutions, I don’t know of any thing that can compete with the ASP.NET+SOAP way of doing things for me. It just look so clean and simple once implemented…
Edited 2006-06-25 03:51
[Deleted my post as it was redundant: I hadn’t read your own post correctly]
Edited 2006-06-25 11:31
Not sure I follow but think you may be missing a layer, you need an app framework like struts or spring on top, personally I prefer Cocoon: http://cocoon.apache.org
struts is a presentation layer not an app framework
I disagree. Struts is an MVC app framework IMHO. It does not JUST help you draw pretty JSPs.