Re: Terracotta (was OFBiz under Tomcat)

[Chris Howe <cj...@yahoo.com>]

It was specifically the clustering part that I was interested in and
was likely going to make an attempt at understanding the concept a bit
more this weekend.  Terracotta (http://www.terracotta.org/) appears to
have a relatively straight forward means of deploying tomcat - and by
extension the applications tomcat is running, but on first look seems
to have a challenging way of going about deploying things that have
tomcat embedded.

I was curious about using the approach of:
1) building with tomcat embedded
2) deploying with OFBiz under Tomcat
3) scaling with Terracotta

Any obvious pitfalls to be looking out for?

--- David E Jones <jo...@hotwaxmedia.com> wrote:

> 
> That is part of the reason, but technically we could do that with  
> OFBiz running inside of Tomcat instead of Tomcat embedded in OFBiz.  
> Actually, in the first few years of OFBiz it wasn't too hard to  
> checkout, build, deploy, and run OFBiz when it was running inside  
> another "app server". The default was Jetty for a long time because
> it  
> wasn't necessary to copy all of the classpath resources to
> directories  
> under the app server directory as is the case with Tomcat.
> 
> What it really comes down to is development and deployment  
> convenience. There are hundreds of classpath entries and a couple of 
> 
> dozen webapps in OFBiz, plus other resources that J2EE app servers  
> don't know anything about like Entity and Service Engine resources,  
> test definitions, and so on. On top of this we don't want all of this
>  
> to be in one big blob, but the different segmented parts need to be  
> able to setup all of the resources they provide.
> 
> That is the reason for the Containers and Components in OFBiz. Some
> of  
> this configuration and functionality can still be used when OFBiz is 
> 
> deployed in another app server, but much of it can still be used  
> either through the template generation stuff or through the automatic
>  
> run-time container loader to initialize OFBiz stuff (as opposed to
> the  
> case where OFBiz starts on its own and embeds everything else and  
> initializes them through a different containers file, the default  
> ofbiz-containers.xml).
> 
> In short it is certainly possible to deploy OFBiz in another app  
> server. Unfortunately standard deployment tools, like the EAR file,  
> are not adequate for something like OFBiz because of limitations in  
> the spec (like not being able to add things to the classloader shared
>  
> by the webapps in the EAR).
> 
> The cost of deploying in another app server is usually such that the 
> 
> benefit gained is less, or sometimes little more than a rounding
> error  
> compared to the cost. On the other hand, if you have a $1,000,000  
> Weblogic cluster or the like then the $40k to build the deployment  
> scripts and templates and the $15k per year to maintain and use them 
> 
> is reasonable (those are rough estimates based on seeing such a thing
>  
> done, and will vary greatly from one organization to another, and
> from  
> one deployment plan to another, and from one app server to another).
> 
> Generally OFBiz runs just as well or better using the embedded tools,
>  
> and supports all of the clustering and other functionality needed to 
> 
> deploy in large-scale environments. It also has the benefit of being
> a  
> configuration tested by WAY more people than a custom deployment  
> process in another app server.
> 
> In general the promise that J2EE apps can be easily written in  
> abstract form and deployed on any compliant app server is one of the 
> 
> greatest  missed opportunities (or mis-representations...) of the  
> marketing and design behind the J2EE specs, and that's true whether  
> you're talking about OFBiz or not.
> 
> -David
> 
> 
> On Apr 21, 2008, at 10:49 AM, BJ Freeman wrote:
> > The biggest reason was to have an OOTB application.
> > just load and run.
> >
> >
> > Chris Howe sent the following on 4/20/2008 10:17 PM:
> >> There was a particular reasoning for running tomcat embedded. 
> What  
> >> was
> >> it?  If those issues are resolved, would it be better to tomcat
> >> (non)embedded?  This would help quite a few integration issues.
> >>
> >> I just did a quick run and it works.  However, there may be a
> >> classloader issue.  I had to copy the mysql jar to tomcat-x/lib  
> >> because
> >> it wasn't getting picked up in ofbiz/framework/entity/lib/jdbc .
> >>
> >>
> >> --- "Jacques Le Roux (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>>     [
> >>>
> >>
>
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1738?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel
> >>> ]
> >>>
> >>> Jacques Le Roux closed OFBIZ-1738.
> >>> ----------------------------------
> >>>
> >>>       Resolution: Fixed
> >>>    Fix Version/s: SVN trunk
> >>>
> >>> Thanks Ludovic,
> >>>
> >>> Your "patch" is in trunk rev. 649921
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I did not test anything, I just added ASL headers to bat and sh
> >>> scripts in the 55 branch and made a page in Wiki at
> >>> http://docs.ofbiz.org/x/gR from your how to.
> >>> I did so for 2 main reasons :
> >>> 1. I have no time to test thorougly, and I suppose that it works 
> 
> >>> from
> >>> your comments this issue
> >>> 2. It's harmless for the project, only people interested may
> >>> encounter issues if any
> >>>
> >>>> Add support for running one instance of OfBiz under Tomcat
> >>>> ----------------------------------------------------------
> >>>>
> >>>>                Key: OFBIZ-1738
> >>>>                URL:
> >>> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1738
> >>>>            Project: OFBiz
> >>>>         Issue Type: New Feature
> >>>>         Components: framework
> >>>>   Affects Versions: SVN trunk
> >>>>        Environment: Mac OS X 10.5.2, JDK 1.5.0_13
> >>>>           Reporter: Ludovic Maître
> >>>>           Assignee: Jacques Le Roux
> >>>>           Priority: Minor
> >>>>            Fix For: SVN trunk
> >>>>
> >>>>        Attachments: ofbiz-tomcat-setup.zip, tomcat.zip
> >>>>
> >>>>  Original Estimate: 8h
> >>>> Remaining Estimate: 8h
> >>>>
> >>>> This issue provide templates and patchs to run one instance of
> >>> OfBiz under Tomcat.
> >>>> The templates are used to:
> >>>> - setup the classpath of Tomcat, (catalina.properties)
> >>>> - declare the ofbiz webapps in the server configuration
> >>>> The files generated from the templates, with the command 'java
> -jar
> >>> ofbiz.jar -setup tomcat', should be copied in the $CATALINA_HOME/
> 
> >>> conf
> >>> folder of Tomcat.
> >>>> IIRC there is also some setup to perform in the first loaded
> >>> webapp, and a few other modifications in the code, i will digg
> into
> >>> it this evening (French riviera time) and create a patch which
> will
> >>> be added to this issue. (the full code is also published on my
> >>> subversion server:
> >>> http://forge.ubik-products.com/repositories/apache-ofbiz/trunk/ ,
>  
> >>> but
> >>> good luck to find the relveant parts :-))
> >>>> Best regards,
> >>> -- 
> >>> This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
> >>> -
> >>> You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> 
>