On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:54 PM, Steven Boscarine <steven.boscarine@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-an-embedded-container-in-maven/