Andreas Schaefer's Blog

February 2004 Archives

A Generic Application Server

Since over a year I am thinking about the next generation Application Server that takes the route of JBoss as an flexible J2EE based server and just go through with it and make everything generic. In this server everything is deployable like Containers, Services (as of Transaction, Security, Persistence, Pooling etc) and Applications. The application server specification is replaced by a contract each deployment unit exposes with their requirements and features they offer. The server will then match the components together so that a fully deployed application is formed. If a component is missing a deployment unit will remain inactive until everything becomes available. Even a naming service is deployed and therefore one server can hosts multiple naming services at once.

Such a server allows an administrator to tailor the server to the hosted applications needs and nothing more. So if no Entity Beans are needed this Container must not be deployed. If an Entity Container is needed based on JDO either a particular JDO Container or a JDO Persistence Service is deployed. It would also allow a Container to expose the Home and Remote Interface in a JMX fashion where a global interface exposes the list of supported methods as well as their invocation. I guess, this would make Web services much simpler.

For more information about this ideas please feel free to visit my personal log.

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