Great points Steven.
Btw, just to add to this discussion, Andrew Rubinger (who we just call ALR)
just informed me of progress on running embedded JBoss from Maven. I haven't
tried it yet because I am currently preparing for JSF Summit, but perhaps
you'll have a chance to stomp on it after getting some turkey, Steven. Or
anyone else.
It would be great to provide ALR with feedback early so that we can get this
right.
-Dan
On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:54 PM, Steven Boscarine <
steven.boscarine(a)childrens.harvard.edu> wrote:
Dan Allen wrote:
> You are correct that for various reasons, many developers are fixated on
> Tomcat and Jetty. However, I do believe that if there are embeddable Java EE
> alternatives, such as Embedded JBoss AS, then the grip on servlet containers
> will loosen.
>
I agree with Dan very strongly. The sooner there's a JEE6 container that
can be launched from maven, like Jetty or Tomcat can now, the "stickier"
JEE6 will become and adoption rates will increase.
The more steps in an evaluation that cannot be scripted the greater chance
that the user will either make a mistake or find something else to do, like
get back to work. :)
IMO, a key group of developers you'd want to target are very busy people.
For many of them, when they are evaluating new software, it is often at the
expense of tasks that their management thinks is of higher priority. When
they are checking out Weld or JSF2, they're often not doing what their
manager wants them to do.
If we make evaluating a technology easy and pleasant, I think they'll be
more likely to want to go further and adopt the technology, tell their
friends, train coworkers, contribute, schedule training, buy books, buy
support contracts, hire consultants, etc. In my experience, busy developers
are often employed by successful companies who have reasonable budgets. If
the getting started procedure is frustrating, I think they're more likely to
stop playing with new technology and just continue using their current
technology (like struts or even pure JSP + Servlets), get back to work, etc.
Currently, GlassFish v3 can be launched from Maven, but it was a side
project by Koshuke Kawaguchi
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/2008/04/28/glassfish-v3-just-got-embeddable It is not as
well documented as Jetty and doesn't auto-deploy modified
classes. It even shares the same plugin name (but different package) as the
official Glassfish plugin which controls a locally installed plugin, making
the plugin very confusing.
I heard a rumor JBoss is working on an embeddable version of JBossAS which
will have a maven plugin which will download and run a container like the
Tomcat plugin. The instant it resembles a working product, I'll happily
include it in the archetypes as I think it'll go a long way towards
increasing JEE6 adoption. It'll make writing applications much easier for
the user and make documenting how to get started a breeze for contributers
like me.
Thanks,
Steven
PS-If anyone hasn't yet used the Tomcat/Jetty/Glassfish plugins, I have an
old blog post explaining how to use them here:
http://info.rmatics.org/2009/04/02/increasing-your-productivity-by-using-...
--
Dan Allen
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat | Author of Seam in Action
Registered Linux User #231597