No reason to give up on JRun
I have received a couple of comments recently about a Blog post I made about the death of JRun. Adobe is not the only vendor who has been slow to update JRun to the latest Java EE spec. Almost every major Java vendor is taking their time upgrading their respective app servers.
This Dr. Dobbs article reports on what the different vendors are doing when it comes to Java EE 5.
Right now ColdFusion is only supported on J2EE 1.4.2. So there is no reason for anyone who is doing dual development on the same server to upgrade to 5.
IBM's WebSphere will not be upgraded again until 2008, and I believe JBoss is on a similiar time frame for their upgrade.
At my company we use JRun, and it has done an excelent job in our enterprise environment. We do most of our development in CFML, so this has not been a major issue. If we did more Java development, we would probably use another vendor.
I am not a big fan of WebSphere because the complexity configuring the server. I have been playing around with WebLogic and JBoss recently. Redhat, Sun and BEA seem to be more focused on pushing Java EE platform forward
Nice post. I wondered why you said you would drop Jrun if you did more java development. Jrun seems to be a competitive Servlet Engine. What does Jrun lack for your uses?
http://www.webperformanceinc.com/library/reports/S...
Some of the newer Java technology is not supported, such as EJB3 and JSF. We do not use any of those technologies at my company, so JRun4 is fine.
David.
That is a good point. Sun has changed the naming of J2EE versions. In fact J2EE is not supposed to be called J2EE anymore. Sun now refers to any version of J2EE past JVM 1.4 as Java EE. For instance, any EE edition based on JVM 1.5 is Java EE 5. It very confusing for most non-Java users.
David
The last version of JRun is certified to version J2EE 1.3. Frankly, there are bigger leaps going to Java EE 5 than from going to 1.4 from 1.3.
Some key changes between 1.3 and 1.4 were as follows;
EJB 2.0 to 2.1
Servlet engine 2.3 to 2.4
Support for Web Services.
The only really major change was the addition of web services, which JRun already supports through Apache AXIS.
ColdFusion runs just fine in Servlet Engine 2.3. I primarily use J2EE as a way to run ColdFusion applications. When I need to extend ColdFusion or JRun, it usually with a Java library that is not core to J2EE.
I guess if I was doing pure Java server development, I would use WebLogic or JBoss.
At this point, I find it hard to believe anyone would really argue JRUN is a going concern. It is just a matter of time before Adobe admits to it.