CRM has reported that Apache is currently hoping for an August release of Geronimo, their application server which is aiming to become J2EE-compliant. There is no official date. Jeremy Boynes said, "We do have an unofficial target date of Aug. 6, but the actual date will be determined by the project team once Geronimo passes the J2EE CTS."

In the meantime, a beta of Geronimo will be available later this month. Boynes also said developers on the project are meeting next week in London to discuss its status.

Read more in Apache Targets August For J2EE App Server Release

Is this yet another Application Server?
What are the major differences between Geronimo and the JBoss (hope that at least documentation should be better)?

I think the big difference will be, Geronimo will have documentation. For Jboss there is no documentation.

Please stop those misleading sentences: JBoss DOES have documentation. It does not have _free_ documentation.
When I need documentation for JBoss I happily paid few dollars from my own pocket.

Jboss has documentation, it is either sparse or dated. They also try to make it difficult to find. They want you to pay for it. They have a very confusing business model. I look at Oracle, BEA and IBM and they all have excellent documentation and made highly visible on their websites.

JBoss has good community based support and the documentation you can buy is quite good (but it could be much better in some areas). Oracle, BEA and IBM demands a lot of money for their software, and they better give you something for it...

I'm looking forward to Geronimo. I only wish that JBoss, Geronimo and JOnAS could have compatible licenses so that they could share code. That would speed up development of all three.

SUN application server 7 PE is FREE for PRODUCTION
AS 7 documentation is FREE too

AS 8 will be same issue and will be probably open sourced

why do you need to pay for anything if you can use SUN app server completely (not like JBOSS) for free???

One reason: convenience.
Being free is not enough: the thing should be convenient for use.

And what is bad in Sun's server comparing with JBoss?
(actually I am asking as JBoss user)

Thank you,
 Dmitry
 http://www.servletsuite.com

We use JBoss for one project, and SunOne for another (at client's demand). Even we can do everything we need/want on both servers, it is usually easier on JBoss.
So SunOne is not that bad.

SUN application server 7 PE is FREE for PRODUCTIONAS 7 documentation is FREE tooAS 8 will be same issue and will be probably open sourcedwhy do you need to pay for anything if you can use SUN app server completely (not like JBOSS) for free???

Very EASY ANSWER, the Sun app servers have been a heaping POS for a long time, they have eroded this credability. If they were good, people would have not looked elsewhere.

I only wish that JBoss, Geronimo and JOnAS could have compatible licenses so that they could share code. That would speed up development of all three.

There are some effort of cooperation between Geronimo and JOnAS.

For example, 2 ObjectWeb project have changed their licenses to BSD to enable an healthy "coopetition" (cooperation and competition as stated by Brian Behlendorf) between the Apache Software (Geronimo) and the ObjectWeb consortium (JOnAS)

o JOTM[1], the transaction manager of ObjectWeb and JOnAS may now be used by Geronimo as its defaut transaction manager.
o ASM[2], an ObjectWeb bytecode manipulation tool which was also released under BSD.

And of course, a lot of ObjectWeb projects use and contribute to other Apache projects.

jeff

[1] http://jotm.objectweb.org
[2] http://asm.objectweb.org

Well I've been using Oracle 9iAS etc for a couple of years now, but I ALWAYS struggle to find any useful documentation from their site(s). They have tons of marketing presentations on new things that will come years from now. (My experience anyway) When problems occur I can easily spend hours searching for any useful documentation on our production ready (!) app server. My best tip is google.
Oracle's site(s) are in my opinion way too db-centered and makes horrible web ui.

I like JBoss, but right now I've some class loader issues… looking for some good doc. ;)

I'm looking forward to see what the Geronimo project will deliver.

erik

Jboss has documentation, it is either sparse or dated. They also try to make it difficult to find. They want you to pay for it. They have a very confusing business model. I look at Oracle, BEA and IBM and they all have excellent documentation and made highly visible on their websites.

well.... they that's because they charge quite good money for app. server. itself. :-)

I think the big difference will be, Geronimo will have documentation. For Jboss there is no documentation.

I am trying to follow your logic here. I think it is:

1) I wish JBoss had more freely available documentation;

ergo

2) Geronimo will have exhaustive freely available documentation.

Unless there is something that exists outside the CVS and Wiki, Geronimo documentation appears to be very sparse at this point. The assumption that hundreds of pages of docs will be suddenly written before 8/16 seems a bit... optimistic.

So, would it better to create open source documentation project for JBoss project instead of creating yet another application server and then adding documentation on top of it. Actually JBoss non free documentation at least 3.02 version of it is not good at all, compare for example to Apache2.0 web server (which is also free).

As I can see from the thread the documentation is the only major benefit of using the Geronimo it looks odd to me.

So, would it better to create open source documentation project for JBoss project instead of creating yet another application server and then adding documentation on top of it. Actually JBoss non free documentation at least 3.02 version of it is not good at all, compare for example to Apache2.0 web server (which is also free).As I can see from the thread the documentation is the only major benefit of using the Geronimo it looks odd to me.

We are working on moving a lot of our JBoss documentation to our new WIKI Anyone is free to contribute any documentation they want and we are expanding it as we have time.

We also have free getting started guides as well as a workbook that goes along with O'Reilly's EJB 3rd edition. See our website for more information.

Regards,

Bill

Very excited about the Wiki. I just looked at the JAAS howto and it's very complete.

Steve

Don't be ignorant - JBoss has excellent documentation. They just ask you to pay the measly $$ for it. Considering the excellent product that JBoss is, its the least one can do.

I am just excited that a project of this scale will be completed in just one year frame! This is ,imho, one of the best examples of doing large scale system development with sound OOP and Java language

Will it have a unified class loader?

If we are lucky Geronimo will not have an unified class loader,
in JBoss it is used just for creating unexplicable conflicts of diferent class versions in diferent apps.
does it has any other utility??

<PLUG>
Unless you absolutely have to have the app server source code; you could be developing and deploying on J2EE 1.4 today (in fact you could have started 3 months ago):

http://java.sun.com/j2ee/1.4/download-dr.html

Free for development and deployment; free docs, samples, forums.

</PLUG>

- Rich

I believe the app server from sun is the reference implementation (RI). I would be scared to use it for production purposes.

Has anyone tried using it with a large user base?

I believe the app server from sun is the reference implementation (RI). I would be scared to use it for production purposes. Has anyone tried using it with a large user base?

Free is only Platform Edition, which is based on RI.

BTW I have tried AS 8 DR and it looks quite good. STRUTS/TILES applications are very fast compared to other servers. Especially JBoss under Linux, which is very very slow. I guess that's because dynamic include is very fast in SUN AS8.

Maris

BTW I have tried AS 8 DR and it looks quite good. STRUTS/TILES applications are very fast compared to other servers. Especially JBoss under Linux, which is very very slow.

How is that related to JBoss???
You are talking about web-container stuff and JBoss comes with Tomcat( as SunOne I believe ) so it should perform comparably. Cannot speak about Jetty package, did not use it.

Java and Linux: it has been mentioned here that JVM on Linux kernels prior to 2.6 is slower than Win JVM on the same hardware.
From onther hand SunOne 7 requires RH enterprise server and does not run on 'normal' Linux at all. How about S1-8? Again, it has nothing to do with JBoss itself.

Is the Geronimo team building a JMS implementation?

Are there plans to integrate ObjectWeb's JORAM into Geronimo?

http://mail-archive.objectweb.org/joram/2003-09/msg00002.html

http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/incubator-geronimo/

http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=geronimo-dev at incubator dot apache dot org&msgId=1023667

That's good, but i am eager for a better serise of docs, at least better than JBoss :(

Is tomorrow, Wed 24th at 7PM, rather than next week and is being hosted by lastminute.com

The Brent Room
lastminute.com
4, Buckingham Gate
London SW1E 6JP

Everyone is welcome, so come along - you can gripe about the documentation in person.

How many app servers do we have in the market - a dozen? Oracle, Borland, Sun, BEA, IBM, JBoss, jONas, Apache? The list is growing and this is bad for productivity and competitions against M$. Choice is good, but too much choice compartmentalizes the market. See what is happening - you spend a year on a project on BEA's server and when you go back into looking for projects, IBM, SUN and JBoss have released newer versions. Worse, with things like BEA workshop framework and other vendors following suit with their own concoctions (none of them remotely comparable with the ease of Visual Studio), developers are going to get locked in more and more. Then you will not have "choice" anymore.
imho, Sun should start releasing specs for J2EE server AND app dev tools. CMP Entity beans is a fine example. I feel like a monkey writing code when using CMP entity beans. I find myself writing endless abstract methods and insane XML deployment descriptors that can ALL be automated. And believe me, over time they will. But how many versions of that will we see?

It's ok. There are just a few major players in wide use. You can easily develop to J2EE spec and go from app server to app server. So the fact that there are many app servers is fine for two reasons: standards, few major players (and niche players have no real impact and do not fragment the market), and widely available open source implementations (no matter what your stance is, if anything, it's great as insurance).

The problem with Microsoft approach is that they purposefully muck up all the standards and introduce quirks so as to break compatibility in very subtle but very significant ways. Thus, in Microsoft realm, of course you wouldn't want 5 different app servers, because they would all be slightly incompatible, slightly quirky and weird. That's just the kind of programming spirit that Microsoft inspires and your argument would make a lot of sense in MS land.

In Java land everyone likes standards. If we stray from a standard then we use a well established open source technology which is a de facto standard and is in many ways superior to a mere data format/API standard (and in MS land, neither data format nor API is an open standard, where "open" is an oxymoron, because all standards must be open, or else what's the point?). So, if you use Hibernate, you are safe. It's not JDO, but it is well established, well understood, transparently developed, well maintained piece of software, and all the source is available so it's not going to just wink out of existence (unlike many proprietary products, which do extactly that, contrary to the noises MS likes to make about the "longevity" and "solidity/responsibility" of their support).

:)