Are you using Sun's Java Application Server Platform Edition 8?
I'm just curious about Sun's Java Application Server Platform Edition 8. It's new and *free* to use and deploy, which is incredible. Since I'd love to have a reason to get away from Tomcat I figured I'd try it out. I went to Sun's site and grabbed it a couple days ago and installed it. I couldn't work out how to use it at all. I played with it for a while, tried to drag-drop the Hello.war into the autodeploy directory and didn't get much out of it. There were weird windows launched, and a million directories installed. Umm, where do I put my .jsp page?
And I *hate* GUIs for setting up web apps - ESPECIALLY Swing-based GUIs. I want server and domain config files I can check into CVS, thanks, just like every other web developer out there. OrionServer works that way and so does Tomcat. No one likes entering bits of config information into a million GUI forms, clicking on the save button, having some sort of error and all your info lost. No one. Give me easily locatable, hand-editable XML files, thanks. Is it really that hard of a concept to grasp?
Someone was just telling me the other day to give Sun a break and some credit. But these sorts of implementation fuck-ups is what drives us all nuts about Sun. Great idea: Free Java App Server from the company that created the language and in some part the market. Perfect. Now why doesn't Sun just provide a simple fucking zip file that I can just unpack, modify like 2 xml files and run? Why am I messing around with installs and a million directories with paths like "c:\Sun\AppServer\domains\domain1\conf\server\server". Hello Sun? Is anyone home? You want developers to *use* this thing, right?
It's probably some decent code below all this implementation mess too. What is so hard about simplicity? Under the "domains" directory, there are literally dozens of directories (including conf and config in the first level below). Why not think about the people who'll actually have to install and support all this stuff at some point? Like I said... where the hell do I actually put my damn .JSP pages?
It's no *wonder* PHP rules the web app world. Honestly.
-Russ