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.