| As with most things open source, setting up JBoss is relatively simple. To begin, you need to download and install a copy of the JBoss ZIP file from www.jboss.org. These examples use version 2.4.3. Be sure to get the base version, not the version with Tomcat (you've already got Tomcat and you don't need another copy, especially a version 3 copy). Unpack JBoss into C:\jboss, which will result in it actually going into C:\jboss\Jboss-2.4.3. If you change directories to C:\jboss\Jboss-2.4.3\bin\and type run.bat , JBoss will start up. That's it, as far as setup for JBoss goes. You can also start it by double-clicking run.bat from a file browser. For reference, a first-time iPlanet setup takes about six hours. Before you can compile or run EJB code under Tomcat, you need to move a bunch of .jar files into the lib directory under Tomcat. These can be found in the \jboss\Jboss-2.4.3\client subdirectory. Move everything that isn't already present in the tomcat\lib directory except the jndi.jar file ”there's already one in Tomcat, and copying another copy causes a sealing exception. COMMERCIAL EJB IMPLEMENTATION When you talk about commercial players in the EJB market, you have basically four choices: iPlanet, Oracle, WebLogic, and WebSphere. iPlanet has an interesting history. It started life as Netscape's Web suite. Netscape was then bought by AOL and partnered with Sun on what was then called iPlanet. Finally, AOL dumped iPlanet, leaving it in Sun's hands. In spite of the musical chairs, iPlanet is a robust, if complicated, set of tools that includes an LDAP implementation and an EJB platform. But with a 4% market share, it has to be considered an also-ran. In another attempt to avoid being typecast as a database-only vendor, Oracle has its own J2EE/EJB implementation. Unfortunately, as with iPlanet, Oracle has failed to gain any significant visibility in the market. WebLogic from BEA is the dominant player, with a whopping 52% market share. As with all the commercial offerings, it isn't cheap or lightweight to host, but it has generally good reviews from the user community. WebSphere is IBM's entry into the EJB race. With 14% of the market, this is the only serious competition to BEA, and it is also thought of well by developers. Note that the market share figures used here are from a fall 2001 report from the Meta Group. | |
