Summary

In this chapter, you have successfully deployed a full-fledged enterprise application to the Geronimo server. Applications can be deployed to Geronimo using either the command-line deployer tool or the Geronimo Web console GUI.

Enterprise applications bundled in EAR file, Web applications bundled in WAR files, EJBs bundled in JAR files, or JCA connectors bundled in RAR file can all be readily deployed to Geronimo.

Deployment descriptors are XML files used during deployment to give the server information and configuration hints for the components being deployed. Standard J2EE deployment descriptors are specific in their names and location. A deployment bundle having only J2EE deployment descriptors can be deployed on any compliant server. Geronimo is designed to be able to work with these bundles as much as possible. In some production cases, however, you may have to add Geronimo-specific deployment descriptors (called deployment plans).

Geronimo deployment plans can either be included as part of the archived bundle or supplied during deployment. Supplying a plan during deployment potentially enables the same application bundle to be deployed in different ways.

As part of deploying an application, you have the option of starting it. Configured and deployed applications are referred to as modules in Geronimo. In general, deployed modules can have their lifecycle controlled and managed by Geronimo. The available states that a component can be in are started, stopped, or failed. Deployed components are persistent between restarts of the server. This means that once you have deployed an application, you will not need to redeploy it unless there are code changes.

Deployed modules are maintained in the repository by Geronimo. The repository is a directory hierarchy. The code and configuration files of a module can be located within this hierarchy under directories matching its module ID. Configuration information is maintained in serialized format in the same directory for optimized loading.

The config.xml file contains descriptions of the modules that are installed and can be used to control those that will be started up when a Geronimo server restarts. It is part of the mechanism that Geronimo used to persist module startup information. You can also override certain attributes of the GBean components in a module by editing the config.xml file. This latter feature is useful for customization of hostname and TCP/IP port for Web-tier services.

In Chapter 3, you will discover some background of Geronimo and the people behind this modern classic Open Source server project.