number 9

Fishes eyes

I’ve been following Glassfish with interest for a while now –
I want a Tomcat replacement: webapps, a connection pool and an admin
interface that doesn’t stink. Not much to ask.

Glassfish2 delivers all that in spades, plus clusters very nicely.
But it also has a lot of J(2)EE features that I’m not really interested in.

Glassfish v3s design follows a ‘microkernel’ model, which should mean its
a lot lighter, faster, and lets you mix and match the features you need.

It’s matured enough for me to give it a go.

Get it from https://glassfish.dev.java.net/downloads/v3-techPreview-2.html. The same ZIPfile runs on all platforms (I’m on a Macbook Pro).

cd ~/Applications
unzip ~/Downloads/gfv3-preview2.zip
PATH=$PATH:~/Applications/glassfishv3-tp2/bin

nice feature #1 : typo detection

hypnotoad:glassfishv3-tp2 $ ./bin/asadmin list-domain
Closest matching command(s):
list-domains
Remote server does not listen for requests on [localhost:8080].
Is the server up?
Command list-domain failed.
hypnotoad:glassfishv3-tp2 $ ./bin/asadmin list-domains
domain1
Command list-domains executed successfully.

nice feature #2 : boot time

hypnotoad:glassfishv3-tp2 $ time asadmin start-domain domain1
Command start-domain executed successfully.
real  0m1.029s
user  0m0.456s
sys 0m0.091s

nice feature #3 : not everyone needs an /admin webapp

First nice feature: open http://localhost:8080 and try
‘to manage the server, click here ‘. Glassfish gets the request for /admin,
realises it doesn’t have an admin webapp, and offers to install it whle U wait:

Once admingui.war downloads, it’s deployed and you get a login prompt.
Login as ‘anonymous’ (no password) and you get the usual admin screen -
as you can see there’s a lot less stuff in there by default.

nice feature #4 : you can deploy things to it

(In my experience, that’s not a given).

Just knock up a stub webapp in Netbeans ( here’s one I made earlier ) and deploy it:

hypnotoad:glassfishv3-tp2 $ time asadmin deploy ~/NetBeansProjects/hellonasty/dist/hellonasty.war
upload file successful: /private/tmp/gfv3/hellonasty.war
Command deploy executed successfully.
real  0m2.393s
user  0m0.288s
sys 0m0.071s

And here it is:

nice feature #5 : finally a use for that OSX 1.6 JVM

Guess you’ll need that admin webapp after all, as I couldn’t find the right
options to asadmin set-jvm-options to switch the default JDK:

(That starred box should say:
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home)

hypnotoad:glassfishv3-tp2 $ ps ax|grep 1.6/Hom[e]
14709 s001  S      0:11.40 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home/bin/java -cp /Users/dick/Applications/glassfishv3-tp2/glassfish/modules/glassfish-10.0-tp-2-SNAPSHOT.jar
....
....
....
instancename server -embedded false -verbose false -domainname domain1

Making Java 6 the systemwide default should work too.

nice feature #6 : documentation

is at : http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1343.7

next steps

Seems to run OK to me, even though OS X isn’t listed as a supported platform yet.
There are a few features missing (asadmin list-commands is a lot shorter than on GFv2)
but I’m pretty pleased with it.

Next on the list : hook up NetBeans and JRuby and try deploying a database-backed Rails app.
I’ve just figured out how to get JavaDB and Glassfish to play nice.