Section 20.2. Downloading JBoss

20.2. Downloading JBoss

JBoss^[1] is a complete application server. It provides a full, production-ready, J2EE environment. Be aware that as of this writing JBoss 4.0 has just passed the Sun J2EE certification tests, but even prior to the certification JBoss has been one of the most widely used J2EE application servers.

^[1] JBoss is actually a combination of two distinct projects: JBoss, the EJB container and JMS server, and Tomcat, the servlet and JSP server. You can install and use Tomcat alone. We won't bother to do that in this book. We'll install JBoss and use JBoss for everything. We are also lazy typists who do not like to keep typing JBoss/Tomcat, so we'll refer to it merely as JBoss from now on. If you are deploying only servlets and JSP, then, by all means, download and install Tomcat only. It is part of the Apache Jakarta project.

A great deal of JBoss information can be found on the JBoss Web site.^[2] Visit the site's download page^[3] to download the product.

^[2] http://www.jboss.org/index.html

^[3] http://www.jboss.org/downloads/

Note

Version 4.0 of JBoss has only just become available, so you will see us using the prior production stable version, 3.2.3. By the time you read this, however, version 4.0 will be the better choice. What we describe should apply equally well to both.

First off, you must choose what form of the product to download. The choice is really between a binary and source distribution. Within that choice, you can choose between a number of compression methods. We will download and install a binary. Just click on jboss-3.2.3.tgz and save the file. Before we install, we need to consider some issues of management.