25 June 2011

Wicket and OSGi

After playing around with the OSGi JPA and JTA components of Apache Aries for a while, it was only natural to try and add a web layer to my sample projects. The Aries samples all use plain old servlets and JSPs, so I wondered if Wicket would work in this context.

So far, I had only ever used Wicket in standard Java EE web applications, but I had noticed the Wicket JARs come with an OSGi manifest, so someone must have tried to use Wicket in OSGi before.

07 June 2011

Java EE 6 Server Comparison: Conclusion

Lessons Learned


Portability is not just a Java EE marketing promise. My application now runs on three different Java EE 6 servers, using the same WAR file, without any compile-time configuration.

An application is not portable until it has been ported. Of course, this is true for any specification with different implementations, not just for Java EE. Each of the three servers helped me discovering incorrect API usage in my application that just happened to work on another server.

Certification is not reliable. My application hit at least one major specification violation in each of the three Java EE 6 certified servers. Thus, the test coverage in the Java EE TCKs must be insufficient.

Java EE 6 Server Comparison: Resin

The first time I read about Caucho Resin 4.x was last summer, when I was looking for alternative CDI implementations, i.e. other than Weld. Resin has its own CDI implementation named CanDI, and I was bold enough to give it a try, knowing that Resin 4.x was not yet Java EE 6 certified and probably not stable enough.

I didn't get very far at that time, CanDI looked ok, but the JPA API was broken and @Singleton @Startup beans did not work, so I left it at that and made a mental note to check back after the first stable release.

Java EE 6 Server Comparison: JBoss

I never did any serious work with JBoss AS 5 or earlier versions. At the peak of my frustration with Glassfish last summer after the 3.0.1 release when CDI continued to be unusable, I knew that JBoss would be no help as it also included Weld, the main source of trouble. Besides, given the number of problems in released and certified Glassfish, I dreaded an even larger number of problems in an unreleased, uncertified and undocumented JBoss.

When JBoss AS 6.0.0 was finally released late in December 2010, with surprisingly little marketing noise and community echo, I briefly had a look at the release and was disappointed to find out that it was still largely undocumented.

Java EE 6 Server Comparison: Glassfish

In April 2010, I started a Java EE 6 project, and Glassfish 3.0 was the obvious server choice, or rather, the only option at that time. For the next couple of months, I spent a considerable amount of time not working on my application, but analyzing, reporting and working around bugs in the server, mainly in the CDI and JPA areas. This appeared to be the price you had pay for being an early adopter of the new Java Enterprise standard.

Java EE 6 Server Comparison: Introduction

A year and a half after the Java EE 6 specification release, there are now three Open Source servers certified for the Java EE 6 Web Profile:
  • Glassfish 3.x
  • JBoss 6.x
  • Resin 4.0.x
Time to take a look at these three servers in direct comparison and do some experiments, not with a toy or benchmark application developed for this purpose, but with a real-life enterprise application.

06 June 2011

Java EE 6 Integration Testing on Resin and Glassfish

jeeunit, my Java EE 6 Integration Testing project, now supports Caucho Resin 4.0.18 in addition to Glassfish 3.1.

Another new feature is a @Transactional annotation which can be used to wrap test methods in an auto-rollback transaction.

The current release jeeunit 0.8.0 is available from Maven Central and from the jeeunit Project Page on Google Code.

01 June 2011

Using CDI from Spring

Spring and Java EE are converging in many areas, mainly due to CDI. In fact, by confining yourself to a suitable subset of annotations and other configuration mechanisms, you can design your persistence and service layers to run either on Java EE 6 or on Spring 3, simply by selecting the appropriate set of libraries.

The web layer is a different story: if your web framework is tightly coupled to either Java EE 6 or Spring, it will be hard or even impossible to simply change the container, but even in the web layer, there are solutions like Apache Wicket which work well both with Spring and Java EE, all you need is some glue code to access the dependency injection container.

I'm currently migrating a web application from Tomcat/Spring to Glassfish, and since this application is based on Spring MVC, I cannot completely replace Spring in this step. The goal of the migration is to drop all Spring dependencies from all components except the web frontend and to somehow make the service beans (stateless session beans and CDI managed beans) visible to the Spring web application context.