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This chapter has described a real workstation used for developing a certain type of web application. Your own needs may differ; this section briefly discusses some other software that may be useful.
The case study system is used to develop J2EE applications that use the Servlet and JSP systems. The specific software used for this is the Tomcat Servlet engine, as discussed earlier in this chapter. However, the realm of Java application servers is very competitive (to say the least) and you may find that you need a different server.
Table 15-2 lists several popular open source servers for developing J2EE applications. Of course, a number of proprietary solutions are available as well. However, these commercial offerings are usually extremely heavyweight and can be overkill to use for development.
SERVER | URL | NOTES |
---|---|---|
JBoss | http://www.jboss.org | An EJB container; embeds Tomcat for Servlet and JSP support |
Orion | http://www.orion.org | A full J2EE server |
J2EE RI | http://java.sun.com/j2ee | The full J2EE reference implementation; no cost, but not open source |
Installing these application servers is a little different in each case, but there's nothing you'll be unprepared for, especially after reading Chapters 7 through 13. When you do install these, you should still probably install them as subdirectories of the /opt/java directory to keep all your Java-related software in the same place.
You may need to develop web applications, but not in the Java programming language. For example, you may need to use the Perl or PHP languages. If you do a little research, you'll find that by using Apache as a core, you can build web applications in a wide variety of languages.
There's no way to describe a universal process for installing these languages, since they're so different. For example, Perl programs use the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and are frequently run from a subprocess separate from the main Apache server, or within the Apache process itself. Contrast this with the approach that Tomcat uses, which is to run a completely separate server process that communicates with the Apache web server over the network via a dynamically loadable Apache module.
However, generally all languages will start with an Apache module. This module will be installed using the apxs program included with Apache, as with Tomcat. What happens after that is up to the system you're installing, but again, you shouldn't encounter anything truly unexpected. Developing applications in these languages, of course, is another matter entirely!
You may need a development workstation, but not for web applications. That is, you may simply be developing traditional desktop applications. In this case, you'll need some, but not all, of the material in this chapter. You'll also most likely need to install additional software related to your needs.
Every developer has his own favorite tools and environments for developing software. There's no way that this book could even begin to cover them all, but fortunately, if you need such a thing you probably already know what you need. (For example, KDE developers may—or may not—prefer to use the KDevelop program for building KDE applications.)
Unfortunately, there isn't much this book can say on this subject. Here again, though, you should be well equipped to handle any eventuality.
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