An Overview of JSP Platforms

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For a developer looking to deploy on JSP architecture, an abundance of platforms are available today, ranging from the cheap and simple to the outrageously expensive and complex. Depending on which platform you choose, different options and capabilities will be put in your tool belt to deploy your site. With that in mind, let's look at some of the current choices and what they bring to the table.

Tomcat

Tomcat is part of the Apache Software Foundation's Jakarta project, which also includes the Ant build tool, the Log4J logging tool, and the Struts application framework. It is an open -source initiative along the lines of Linux, allowing anyone to contribute to the final product if they want.

Tomcat is a no-frills "pure" implementation of the JSP and Java Servlet standards. Sites designed under Tomcat should work with no need to tweak them under any JSP-compliant server.

Just because it's free, don't discount it as some flimsy piece of software. Tomcat has had the benefit of many, many developers poring over it, and much as with other open-source projects, this has resulted in a very robust and efficient product.

Tomcat also has the advantage of running on just about anything with a modern Java development kit and a network connection, from low-end Windows boxes to multiprocessor Solaris servers. This holds to the Java "write once" philosophy. This allows you to scale your platform as the demand grows.

However, Tomcat falls short in the more advanced features needed by high-end Web sites, such as seamless failover. For that, you need to either write your own platform or go with one of the commercial (and much more expensive) platforms.

ATG Dynamo

Dynamo from Art Technology Group is part of a soup-to-nuts solution platform that also includes Dynamo Personalization Server and Dynamo Commerce Server. The first thing to know is that Dynamo is not cheap; it starts in the five figures and gets worse from there.

The main thing that Dynamo brings to the table is a lot of prefinished work if you want to implement certain kinds of e-commerce applications, especially ones involving shopping carts and member personalization. Even so, they are only templates; you'll still need to do extensive customization and extension to get them to work the way you want for your specific requirements.

Dynamo also has its own scripting language, which looks much like HTML, to use as an adjunct to JSP. The theory seems to be that it will make the people who work on the Web pages, but who are not developers, feel more comfortable if they don't see a lot of Java sprinkled in the middle of the HTML.

In reality, however, the tagging syntax is overly verbose and can end up making you use 20 lines to say what you could in 4 or 5 of pure JSP. I worked on one project in which we tried as hard as we could to do everything purely using the scripting language, at the customer's request, and we almost went insane from the effort.

iPlanet

iPlanet is the answer to the question, "What happens when you mate Netscape, Sun, and AOL?" In many ways, iPlanet is Tomcat on steroids. Sun lumps a lot of products, including an LDAP server, messaging server, and calendar server, under the iPlanet heading. However, we're going to talk about just the application server in this context.

iPlanet uses Sun's Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), as a base for JSP/EJB “based server. It is designed to be highly scalable, it offers support for high-reliability operations, and it can be integrated with many legacy applications through connectors.

For example, iPlanet can be configured easily to use IBM MQSeries messaging services or to talk to an SAP system. When you are deploying into a large existing customer with lots of big iron, these kinds of integration capabilities can be crucial timesavers.

At its heart, it's still a JSP server, though. And if you want to layer a lot of separate pieces onto Tomcat, you could make it look a lot like iPlanet, except perhaps for the intangible claims of Sun that it runs really fast and doesn't crash.

WebSphere

It wouldn't be a party unless IBM was invited, right? As part of the company's 180 ° turnaround from proprietary software to open source, IBM has come out with its own JSP server.

WebSphere is available in several editions, which span the range from a Tomcat-like JSP server to a full blown "do-everything" product, like iPlanet.

Again, like iPlanet, the major cards that IBM brings to the table are claims of high reliability and throughput, and easy integration with legacy applications ”and it'll even shine your shoes.

WebLogic

Like IPlanet and WebSphere, WebLogic is a JSP platform layered with integration to back-end legacy systems, personalization, a portal server, and so on.

WebLogic claims that its application server is number 1 in the market, and it certainly seems to have a large and active customer base.

The choice between the big four commercial platforms will largely center on the feature set that you need and an evaluation of which platform best meets those needs.

If you're considering one of these platforms (especially iPlanet or WebSphere), it's probably for something really big and really complicated. They are 50- pound sledge hammers meant to address complex applications in large organizations. Thankfully, we won't be dealing with anything that massive in this book, so we will let them lie.

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