GlassFish Presentation Questions FAQ

The purpose of this page is to capture the list of questions (and answers) raised at the GlassFish Presentations. The questions included are those raised at:

• GlassFish presentation to New England Java Users Group, May 10, 2007

Questions

Q. *Is v3 going to be able to run Java EE 5 applications ? i.e. Is it backward compabible ?
*
A. v3 is the Standard Implementation for Java EE 6. One of the goals of Java EE 6 is to prune out features. Pruning refers not to the deletion of the actual feature from the specification, rather the conversion of a feature from a required component of the Java EE platform to an optional one. Thus, a feature may be removed from a Java EE 6 vendor's implementation at a vendor's choice. See http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail-313.

Q. Is GlassFish v3 (with container loading on demand) being targeted towards market served by Tomcat ?
A. The focus of GlassFish v3 is modularization, enablement of non Java EE containers and embeddability. To realize these goals, GlassFish v3 loads containers on demand and will have a fast startup time. So, compared to GlassFish v2, GlassFish v3 will signficantly speed up the development cycle of building, starting the application server and running an Web application.

Q. __How long as Grizzly/JSP container been around ? Is it being widely used ?
How is the performance?__
A. Grizzly was born in 2004 in the GlassFish project and later became Grizzly 1.0. The development of Grizzly 1.5 began in 2006. Grizzly was open sourced on Feburary 6, 2007.

Several projects have been succsessfully using Grizzly 1.0 - JRuby On Grizzly, GlassFish v2, GlassFish v3, Sun Web 2.0 Developer Pack, Comet/Cometd, AyncWeb on Grizzly, Phobos.

For a performance comparision of Grizzly versus other HTTP servers, see slide 13
of https://grizzly.java.net/presentations/FISL-2007.pdf.

Q. Is there an eclipse plugin for GlassFish?
A. Yes. See https://glassfishplugins.java.net for more information.

Q. What is NetBeans ? It looks just like Eclipse.
A. Need to get official answer from netbeans-feedback@sun.com .

Q. __Can jMaki be used to wrap widgets using JSF (as opposed to
JSP which was the e.g. I showed)?__
A. Yes. See: https://ajax.java.net/usingFaces.html.

Q. __I am using Axis. What is the difference between JAX-WS and Axis ?
I used JAX-RPC in the past.__
A. TBD

Q. __HA is available with product version. A person from CSCO asked a question. Vella
answered it. I will defer to Vella for both the question and answer.__
A. TBD - Defer to Vella

Q. __Is it possible to use a clustered instance for a specific purpose?
For e.g. is it possible to say use one app server instance to do authentication ?__
A. TBD - Defer to Kedar

Q. __Is it possible to configure in memory replication so that some but not all the
information is replicated ?__
A. TBD - Defer to Kedar. Note: The use case for this is not clear.

Q. Is Shoal a requirement for clustering ?
A. TBD - Defer to Ganapathy.

Q. How is Shoal used?
A. [ I wrote it up but it needs to be reviewed (wording borrowed from existing blogs)- Sekhar|Iwroteitupbutitneedstobereviewedwordingborrowedfromexistingblogs-Sekhar]
Project Shoal provides a generic clustering framework for any product requiring
clustering features. It is used Java EE/J2SEE application servers to support clustering
features such as

• • Automated delegated transaction recovery
  • Timer migrations
  • IIOP Failover Loadbalancer
  • Self Management
  • Read-only Bean's cache change notifications
  • Domain Admin Server for cluster health
  • In-memory replication component's discovery and failure

In GlassFish V2, Project Shoal clusters multiple Glassfish appserver instances using the
JXTA technology. Leveraging the JXTA self-organizing and dynamic group networking
infrastructure, Project Shoal allows administrators to easily deploy and dynamically
group Glassfish appserver instances into a cluster. Project Shoal's highly-decentralized
implementation removes the traditional cluster master single point of failures and
control by decentralizing the master function accross all instances. Any instance can
take over master's responsability, if the existing Master fails. New instances can be
added dynamically on-demand enabling massive-scale appserver clustering deployment.

See http://shoal.java.net for more information.