The BileBlog

It’s surprising how many J2EE application servers go out of their way to be impure java. For the uninitiated, java has a perfectly functional launch model. You can specify all your classpath dependencies via a manifest file, and all your environment variables on the command line (of course, being a considerate developer, you make sure your app runs with sensible defaults if no env vars are specified). All you have to do is double click on a jar file (if you’re a windows weenie or enlightened OSXer), or run it with java -jar myapp.jar (if you’re a linux zealot, solaris diehard, enlightened OSXer, or anything else vaguely unixy).

Yet, despite this wonderful system (which does have its flaws, admittedly), most application servers go out of their way to make the process more complicated, less intuitive, more cumbersome, and generally as uncivilised as possible.

For example, Weblogic comes with a bevy of cmd and sh files. They all gleefully call one another, and have much hardcoding in them to explicitly disallow anything other than their official platforms to run. Amusingly enough, a few minutes of hacking away at these evil monstrosities and you’re able to get Weblogic running wonderfully on OSX, even if BEA recently proclaimed to me that they have no plans whatsoever to offer any sort of anything that is vaguely usable on OSX. The strange part is that the ONLY requirement is to make some of those idiotic cmd and sh files a bit more generic and usable, and suddenly, you have a developer preview edition of Weblogic on OSX.

Next up is JRun. This little appserver, written in pure java, has the most bizarre startup system of them all. I realise it’s quite functional and works nicely, but they try so hard to avoid using anything vaguely standard that it’s actually impossible to get their product to run on a platform they don’t officially support. They compile native binary launchers that presumably do very little beyond look for a JVM, specify a startup directory and JRun configuration. Still, at least after constant pestering they provide an OSX version.

As for Websphere, O Websphere…you evil monster. The pain, the horror, the sheer weight of a Websphere install is enough to make the baby Jesus cry hot tears of frustration. Yet again, a breathtaking array of launcher files (all platform specific). They win extra points for having most of their tools runtime.exec() their own launcher files, thus wisely ensuring that life is as difficult and unwieldy as possible for anyone wanting to fix that mess. Needless to say, Websphere is so tied to specific platforms that the server won’t even start up without invoking native code.

Tomcat also deserves an honourary mention, for pretending that it’s possible to have object oriented shell scripting, and splitting off functions into a number of scripts. Again, going out of its way to be un-userfriendly and unwieldy. Of course, this doesn’t matter much to tomcat users as Jakarta could feed them a fistful of steaming turds and they’d run off and write rave reviews about how innovative the flavour is.

As much as it pains me though, I have to give credit to JBoss. They seem to ‘get it’ as far as launching is concerned, and provide a nice jar file you can run. The only shame is that that is the high point of JBoss, and everything that happens after that initial launch is less impressive. Orion likewise manages to provide a simple and wonderfully effective launch mechanism.

I realise that in some cases, native code is needed. I also realise that in order to appease the marketing windows gods, you need to provide a .exe launcher. Please please don’t crap on the rest of us who don’t fill their underpants at the sight of a terminal though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2003 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.