I'm trying to build my own site where initially I will only host my profile and resume but will also build and publish some simple web applications that I can use as coding samples for jobs. The idea is people can see a demo of the apps and then see the code on github.
Can I do all this using only tomcat or should I use another server for this purpose?
I have heard that tomcat should only be used for java web applications but I've tried it locally and it seems to work...
You can totally do it all with tomcat.
Arguably, tomcat is not as efficient as apache or ngnix for serving static assets, 10% less so, and does not scale as well. There's a good article on the subject here:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-3.2-doc/tomcat-apache-howto.html
This is not not going to be an issue for you with a small site. Go with what gets you up and running the fastest.
If you want, later you can show off your technical prowess by running tomcat behind a web server. You can tell folks at interviews the story.
Related
I have a VPS where I want to install a web application for production.
Currently, it works on Tomcat 6 connected through Apache Server using AJP module.
Every thing works ok, but I want to know if it is a good idea to configure Tomcat as the main web server due we gonna run only JSP applications.
FYI: the server must handle https requests.
Thanks in advance.
Misinformation
Years ago there was much misinformation against using Tomcat directly as a web server, but in fact Tomcat works very well as such.
I've used nearly every version of Tomcat on various projects, though all were relatively low volume. Never let me down – well, the WebDAV module never worked right. But other than that Tomcat is fast and reliable both for static content as well as dynamic servlet work.
httpd
Apache HTTP Server ("httpd") is of course very advanced and full of features. If you need those features, then use httpd. If you have very high volume traffic, then use httpd. If you have huge amounts of static access and want to relieve Tomcat of that duty thereby letting Tomcat focus its performance on your servlets, then use httpd. If you want to keep a front-facing web site running while take Tomcat up and down, use httpd. But for most relatively simple web sites or simple web apps, Tomcat suffices.
I suggest you try Tomcat alone and see how it goes. Start with your development and testing systems. Review your config files for httpd to see if all its features can be reproduced using Tomcat features. If that all works, then do some load-testing. Either hack some load-tests of your own, or try any of the many load-test frameworks.
While you can hot-deploy webapps to Tomcat, that was not always recommended in production (I'm not sure about current versions). Plan how to handle taking down Tomcat to deploy updated apps and to perform maintenance chores.
Recent Tomcat
You say you are using Tomcat 6. You may want to consider moving to Tomcat 7 or 8, but review the release notes.
Jetty
Also consider Jetty, the most direct competitor/alternative to Tomcat. Jetty is much akin to Tomcat in its purpose, scope of features, and great reputation.
If you're using SSL you will get the following benefits by front-ending with Apache HTTPD:
Ability to specify cipher suites in order of preference, which is practically mandatory if you want case-hardened SSL, and impossible with Tomcat alone.
Ability to request or require client certificates on a per-location basis instead of globally, which is Tomcat's only mechanism.
There are many other benefits as well, such as:
the ability to load-balance between multiple Tomcat instances, which alone is probably enough of a reason to do it
more control over what's logged and where the log files go
more tools to defend against attacks of various kinds.
I used standalone Tomcats for years, but having made the switch I would never go back even for a clean-sheet project.
I don't think either is better, it depends on your requirements. In environments where you may have to address security or logging requirements horizontally across heterogeneous backends (IIS, Tomcat, etc), Apache is your friend (or an expensive load balancer).
Assuming you don't have these requirements, I don't know of any advantage in using Apache for Apache sake.
SSL is easily configured in Tomcat and performance these days is likely to be on par with Apache and can be improved with APR.
looking into hosting sites (for a play framework application) i have noticed 2 options VPS & Dedicated JVM Java Hosting. will i be able to achieve same result using both options eventually or is one more limited ?
Borderline question. In fact, both strategies have advantages and inconvegnients. But for Playframework, you must be thinking about :
Playapps
Heroku
Jelastic
for the JVM Hosting. Just take into account the fact, Play is supposed to be served through it's embedded Jetty for better performance. When deploying to Jelastic, it will be deployed as a WAR. Performance issues might appear when using WARs instead of the out-of-the-box solution.
On the other side, a VPS must be configured can have security issues and all that. As I said, both have good and bad.
There are a couple of things that should be cleared.
Play framework comes with netty web server (not jetty, which is the server used by heroku), and play developers advice users to deploy on that server for production, mainly in order not to waste resources (a servlet container comes with lots of stuff that is not needed) and to deploy on the same platform that you are developing.
There are no performance issues deploying your application as a war exploded folder on any servlet container, it's just that you might be wasting resources.
The only disadvantage is that you won't be able to take profit of asynchronous requests.
Now there are lots of options to deploy a play application: openshift, heroku, gae, cloudbees, jelastic, dotCloud, playapps... in fact any servlet container will do.
have a look at this question: Experiences on free and low-cost hosting for play framework applications?.
if you are looking for an unexpensive option, I would go with openshift.
Apart from that is like Zenklys said, on a VPS you are your own IT department...
We're using Windows 2008 and we are thinking of switching application servers from Adobe ColdFusion 9 to Railo 3.1. This would mean using a new Java servlet container, so instead of Adobe JRun 4, we're looking at Apache Tomcat.
Adobe have a helpful perfmon plugin for CF9. We can gather most stats with that. The problem is, as far as I understand, there is no perfmon plugin for Tomcat.
I wanted to know if there are any kind of free profiling tools we can use to get metrics and performance data on Tomcat, for example requests/sec, memory usage etc.
I don't mind if they are just written to logs so long as we can read them in some format. Also, it doesn't have to be a stand-alone product.
Any and all help appreciated!
Just curious - which application server are you using now? Which one uses perfmon now?
Because you've got to run Tomcat on an operating system - Windows, Linux, etc. You seem to imply that perfmon is useless to you now. I don't believe that's the case.
If you need to embellish info from perfmon, you can certainly buy something. But the cheapest solution for you would be filters that would intercept every incoming request and outgoing response to calculate request counts, response time, etc. You'd write these classes once and declare them in your web.xml. They could write to logs using log4j.
Or maybe Hyperic's solution is what you have in mind. It used to be open source, but Spring bought them a few years back. Then VMWare bought Spring. It's all part of a grander solution.
LambdaProbe will give you monitoring for sessions, memory used, web app sessions and servlets, connections etc.
Take a look at the demo site http://demo.lambdaprobe.org/ for more.
Site login: demo/demo
I want to write an application that runs entirely locally on one machine - there is no need for connection to the internet or to any external machines.
I was thinking that it would be a good idea to use a web browser as the platform for this application so that I would not have to mess around with lots of UI stuff - I could just knock together the web pages fairly quickly and take advantage of CSS to get consistent styles throughout the application.
However I want to interact with a MYSQL database on the machine in question. With this in mind I was thinking that I could somehow use Java to process the information that the user inputs from the application and communicate it to the database via JDBC.
I know that I could use an applet to do this but the downside to that is that I would like the user to be able to save files to the local machine - and I have read that applets run in a sandbox which prevents them from gaining any access to the local machine.
I also know that I could use PHP but I would like to take advantage of object oriented design which Java is perfect for.
Does anyone have any thoughts, suggestions or links to tutorials/webpages which could help me to decide how best to go about this.
Any thoughts are very much appreciated..
I know you said you don't want to mess around with GUI stuff in java, but have you looked in to java web start? It does almost exactly what you need; a user clicks a link through a web browser and your application is deployed on their machine, it even checks to make sure the right JVM is used. Because it is a full application and not an applet, your app won't be sandboxed, and you don't have any access restrictions in your program (other than the normal java stuff..), and for example, it would be easy to do what you mentioned and talk to a mySQL DB. The only downside, is what I mentioned earlier, is that you would have to design a UI in java.
Web Start Wikipedia Page
Sun FAQ on Web Start
Grails may be a useful starting point. It'll provide you with a web server solution that's standalone, and it'll look after the JDBC requirements and the CRUD (create-read-update-delete) capability via dynamically generated web pages. It should take minimal effort to put together an app providing your database interfacing via web pages.
(fyi. Grails is the Java equivalent of Rails)
If you feel comfortable with Java EE-based web development, you could probably just bundle your application with Tomcat or Jetty.
If you do not want to run standalone servlet container just for one application, you can also embed Jetty into a runnable Java application (see documentation here).
Either way you can leverage existing Java EE frameworks (Spring JDBC, Hibernate, all those web frameworks) for abstracting away technical complexities, although with embedded Jetty, you'd probably need to write some kind of integration layer for the web application framework of your choice.
I think you should give Restlet, a lightweight rest framework a try. The tutorial shows you how to start a local webserver, and by that deliver a "Hello World" through the browser within minutes (no joke!), and there's plenty of extensions for any kind of need.
In combination with Java Web Start by which you can deploy and start the application to the local host this should be what you need.
as someone suggested already you can use embbeded jetty server on your application and just let your user to start it using somekind of shell script or batch script. You only need to make your layour directory complaint with a Java Web Application and your on it. ie:
MyApplication
app/
WEB-INF/
lib/
classes/
web.xml
start.bat |
start.cmd - depends on your client OS
start.sh |
Then you should only need to take care of launching Jetty in your start.[bat|cmd|sh] with your app as your webaplication context and your done!
Using JDBC doesn't mean that you have to write an applet, you can use JDBC in any kind of application: a desktop application, a web application, EJBs, MDBs, etc.
You want to use a browser and Java on the server side? Then go for it and use Servlets / JSPs. Consider maybe using an presentation framework (Wicket, Struts2, Spring MVC,...), Hibernate for data access and Spring for other facilities and wiring. Grails is a good idea too.
BTW, I'm not a PHP specialist but PHP has object-oriented capabilities (introduced in PHP4 , enhanced in PHP5) so you won't sacrifice everything if you choose PHP.
So it really depends of what you want to do. If you want to write some Java (webapp or desktop app): choose Java. If you want to put quickly a few web pages in place and have an apache server, choose PHP. If you look for really high productivity, go for RoR or Grails.
You can try GWT + Google Gears
GWT is a GUI toolkit similar to Swing for the browser. Google Gears is a browser side database. Your app is completely in Javascript in a single HTML file and cross-browser compatible.
GWT app can make Server calls and Gears can sync up with a Server database. So you need not restrict your app data completely to the local desktop.
If you're interested in some experimentation, like new stuff and would like to reuse the plethora of Java libs (including JDBC) then you might be interested in the lift web framework, which is Scala-based.
If you want to do it as an applet you can. Sign the applet and give it permissions to the local network (to connect to the MYSQL server that way)... that should be possible. Here is a tutorial on it.
I am fairly comfortable with standalone Java app development, but will soon be working on a project using a Java EE application server.
Does anyone know of a straightforward how-to tutorial to getting a hello-world type application working in an application server? I'm (perhaps naievly) assuming that the overall approach is similar between different frameworks, so I'm more interested in finding out the approach rather than getting bogged down in differences between the different frameworks.
If you are not aware of a good guide, then could you post bullet-point type steps to getting a hello-world running?, i.e.
Download XX
Write some code to do YY
Change file ZZ
Other steps...
Note: Just because I have a windows machine at home, I would prefer to run if this could be run on windows, but in the interest of a better answer, linux/mac based implementations are welcome.
I would choose JBoss AS or GlassFish for a start. However I'm not sure what you mean by Java EE "Hello World". If you just want to deploy some JSP you could use this tutorial (for JBoss):
http://www.centerkey.com/jboss/
If you want to get further and do the EJB stack and/or deploy an ear-file, you could read the very good JBoss documentation:
Installation Guide
Getting started
Configuration Guide
In general you could also just do the basic installation and change or try the pre-installed example applications.
I currently have JBoss installed (on windows). I develop with Eclipse and use the Java EE server integration to hot deploy or debug my code. After you get your first code running you realy should have a look at the ide integration since it makes development/deploy roundtrips so much faster.
The JavaEE (they dropped the 2) space is pretty big. A good tutorial to start is the one from Sun. For a simple hello world application, the web container only would suffice. A well known servlet jsp container is tomcat. See here for installation instructions. Try installing it with eclipse and create a web project. This will generate some files for you that you can look at and edit. Also starting and stopping the application server is simpler.
Another option is to get Oracle JDeveloper (free to download and use - it's a full featured IDE that includes some neat extras like the SQL workbench and BPEL designer).
As a learning tool, it is quite good, not only for the tutorials available from Oracle, but it includes a range of "cue-card" lessons in the tool itself to teach many common techniques.
cue card view http://tardate.heroku.com/images/jdev-cuecards.jpg
If you haven't gone near NetBeans in a while its catching up with Eclipse very fast and worth a look, especially when starting Java EE.
Version 6.x installs Tomcat and/or Glassfish for you and then provides wizards to create/deploy/redeploy applications.
The initial tutorial on Web Applications is here and a more complex example here.
As JeroenWyseur puts it, Java EE is a fairly big space. In addition to what he said, you should try to get more details of what exactly you'll be doing: servelts & co, EJB (entity, session, message beans?) and try to get familiar with that.
It should be clear for you that your code runs in a managed environment, which imposes a lot of constraints. in order to make sure you understand what happens you should get familiar with the concept of deployment. Then, if you do EJBs, transaction management is important too. If you don't understand exactly what happens when a bean or a servlet is deployed, how transactions are managed, how beans are invoked, you're going to have a hard time.
A book that helped me a lot back in the time is Mastering EJB, by Ed Roman.
Also, getting familiar with RMI will help you understand EJBs.