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-...