Re: Glassfish

Hi Thorbjørn,

In any way, I am not flamebaiting

Clearly not. BTW, I may have miscommunicated. My comments were pretty much about appservers and webservers on the AS/400. We have a number of AS/400 Java projects that run on AS/400's and I've never been unhappy with the results. As an aside, I'm also on the Mac developer list and there are some irate (to put it mildly) developers there because JDK 1.6 was not included in Friday's Leopard release. Somebody compared Apple with IBM and HP, at which point I sent a mail just to inform them that the AS/400 has had 1.6 since July.

AS/400 requires careful tuning to perform well with Java,

Yep.

Depends on what the load is

Agreed. But my thought for most AS/400 sites is, how is the "normal" load impacted by the additional resource drain of an app/web server?

situation where you do lots and lots of heavy SQL you
may benefit from running natively on the machine.

Should definitely, if the native driver is used. But there are many different efficiencies. Sometimes I feel that my most valuable service is choosing among efficiencies (especially when I make the right choice ;-)) Certainly there are projects where database response is paramount, although usually overall throughput and scalability are most important.

Even if it seems so, my counter responses are no more than that: opposing considerations. As is so often the case in computerdom, the truest answer is "it depends."


Joe Sam

Joe Sam Shirah - http://www.conceptgo.com
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen" <thunderaxiom@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Java Programming on and around the iSeries / AS400" <java400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2007 2:20 PM
Subject: Re: Glassfish


Joe Sam Shirah skrev den 29-10-2007 18:42:

Hi Thorbjørn,

Does this mean you have initial experience with running
Glassfish on AS/400?

I'm not sure if this was directed at me or Glenn. You can read his
response. Let me say first that my answer is not flame-bait, just my own
thoughts from years of dealing with the AS/400 (since System 3,) PC's, and
Java (since 1997.) If anybody wants to discuss strengths and weaknesses
with the goal of reaching optimal outcomes, I'm happy to discuss. If it's
"my dog's bigger than yours," I'll watch the food fight, but that's about
it.

I am genuinely interested in hearing what experiences others have, as we
are currently integrating Java closely with our legacy product, and web
containers is very interesting due to their basic design which may allow
us to use them as "component containers". We have also found that the
AS/400 requires careful tuning to perform well with Java, but when that
is done it works very well. The JVM is a very different beast than the
ones running on Windows and Linux, but it is not untameable :)

Myself I have experimented with Jetty (for a tiny standalone web service
container), Tomcat (for generic webapps) and had a glance at Resin and
JBoss. I believe in diversity so therefore Glassfish is interesting
since it is the first OpenSource J2EE container coming from Sun and
their priorities are different than most other players on the J2EE marked.

First, it would be difficult to put Glassfish on the AS/400 as it
stands, because the available downloads all have platform specific
installers. One could compile the source themselves, but I'd rather be
developing.

I have no idea why they do it like that, but it would be a good
community deed to create a OS/400 friendly package. I.e. a jar file
which just extracts itself.

(IMO, of course.) The AS/400 obviously has many strengths, but I think
database and security are the most outstanding. From several vantage
points, I don't think webserver is a strong point. Even if it was, in a
time of sub $1000 quad core machines, I'd rather put the server load on one
or several almost throwaway boxes. That's in general.

Depends on what the load is, in a situation where you do lots and lots
of heavy SQL you may benefit from running natively on the machine.
Oracle has a similar benefit with their JVM, but I don't know if they
still like that idea.

In any way, I am not flamebaiting but generally just curious about how
well things work with the machine that pays my salary. Please do not
take this in any other way.