News »Browse Articles » Top 6 Open Source Java EE Application Servers

This is a very basic review of active and available open source Java EE Application servers and Servlet container (Web containers) to let the community know which active containers are available and what is the general status of each container. The article can simply act as a start point for anyone need to select one of them for later use in development or product. Detailed comparison of these production cover many pages of a tick book.

Full blown Open Source Java EE Application Servers:

Geronimo: The Apache Java EE application server which is obviously distributed under ASF. Geronimo lacks behind GlassFish when it come to implementing new Java EE specification but it benefits from a good administration console compared to JBoss. Clustering is available trough 3rd party products like Terracotta and there is no out of the box support for clustering and high availability. Geronimo is well integrated with other apache projects like ServiceMix and ActiveMA. Current version of Geronimo is v2.1.4 and fully support Java EE 5 specification. Commercial support for Geronimo is available through IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.

Two separate distribution of Geronimo is available, one with Jetty as web container and the other one with Tomcat as the web container. All Major IDEs support Geronimo as a development server.

* Download link: http://geronimo.apache.org/apache-geronimo-v214-release.html
* How to start: goto install_dir/bin and issue ./geronimo.sh start or geronimo.bat start depending on the OS
* administration console details: URL: http://localhost:8080/console/ credentials: system/manager

GlassFish: Mainly developed by sun Microsystems and benefits from a modular, and extend-able architecture. GlassFish is in the front line of providing the community with new Java EE specification implementation and in the same time it provides all users with features like: advanced administration channels, out of the box clustering and high availability, OSGI runtime deployment and so on. Using Glassfish means that users can easily sign a contract and get support from Sun without need to change the deployment bits. current GlassFish stable version is GlassFish 2.1.1 and the next major version is GlassFish v3 which is a fully Java EE 6 compliant and OSGI based application server. The new version is due to be released on November this year. Open source GlassFish is accessible under CDDL and GPL licenses.

GlassFish benefits from integration with a wide set of Sun products starting from operating system (Solaris) up to the IDE (NetBeans). GlassFish ESB, Open Portal, OpenSSO and OpenMQ are some of the notable projects that GlassFish is well integrated with.

Another strength in GlassFish is integration with Sun HADB which can form a proven highly available infrastructure without spending any penny for the required software and licenses.

All Major IDEs support GlassFish as a development server and it means an easy start for developing Java EE applications using GlassFish.

* Downlod link: https://glassfish.dev.java.net/downloads/v2.1.1-final.html
* How to start: goto intall_dir/bin and issue asadmin start-domain
* Administration console details: URL: http://localhost:4848 Default credentials: admin/adminadmin

JBoss: It was present in the open source community longer than other projects and benefits from Red hat support. JBoss Application server provides Clustering and high availability out of the box but the administration console which included in the distribution from version 5.1 is not advanced enough to let administrators manage the all application server resources . The included administration and management console is an embedded version of Jopr (http://www.jboss.org/jopr). This console will acts as a single point of administration and management for all JBoss technologies like ESB, cache et. Current version of JBoss is 5.1.0.GA and next upcoming version is 5.2. JBoss is distributed under LGPL and anyone interested can get commercial support from Red Hat. JBoss community distribution and enterprise distribution are two different package and and moving from community support to commercial support means installing an alternate version of Jboss named JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

JBoss application server benefits from integration with a wide range of middleware provided by JBoss. This products include caching, BPM, ESB, portal and so on. On the development side, it benefits from JBoss Developer Studio (not available for free) which is based on Eclipse and provide tooling for wide range of middlewares provided by Jboss.

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Source:
http://soa.dzone.com/articles/top-open-source-javaEE-application-servers?utm_sou

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