Having trouble finding information about the application client container.

[Ryan <ry...@vacode.com>]

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone can tell me where I can find some information on
Geronimo's implementation of an application client container.  I would
like to run an application client from a machine that does not have
Geronimo installed.  As I understand things I should be able to use an
application client container to set up the environment necessary for
connecting to the application server.  I'm also interested in using the
application client container to perform user authentication.

As an example, Glassfish has an application client container that can be
created using a package-appclient utility they provide.  After that,
running an application client is as simple as executing the application
client container while passing the actual application .jar as a
parameter.  However, there were several aspects of the Glassfish
implementations that I didn't care for, so I'm looking for an alternative.

Application client containers are briefly mentioned in the JavaEE 5
specification (chapter EE.9 of the final release):

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=244

I'm working with Apache Geronimo 2.0-M2.

Thanks for your time,
Ryan Jaeb

Re: Having trouble finding information about the application client container.

[David Jencks <da...@yahoo.com>]

Sorry for the delay in replying

On Feb 5, 2007, at 12:12 PM, Ryan wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm wondering if anyone can tell me where I can find some  
> information on
> Geronimo's implementation of an application client container.  I would
> like to run an application client from a machine that does not have
> Geronimo installed.  As I understand things I should be able to use an
> application client container to set up the environment necessary for
> connecting to the application server.  I'm also interested in using  
> the
> application client container to perform user authentication.
>
> As an example, Glassfish has an application client container that  
> can be
> created using a package-appclient utility they provide.  After that,
> running an application client is as simple as executing the  
> application
> client container while passing the actual application .jar as a
> parameter.  However, there were several aspects of the Glassfish
> implementations that I didn't care for, so I'm looking for an  
> alternative.
>
> Application client containers are briefly mentioned in the JavaEE 5
> specification (chapter EE.9 of the final release):
>
> http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=244
>
> I'm working with Apache Geronimo 2.0-M2.

That's bleeding edge-- you should build geronimo and openejb from  
source, updates are happening every day.  In the latest source at  
least some ejb refs work from appclients.

At the moment its by far easiest to run the app client if you have  
the whole geronimo server installed in the client machine along with  
the app client configuration itself.  This is a big problem, but at  
the moment there's no very easy way to extract just the bits you need  
(which is not very much of the server).  I'm not sure it's currently  
practical to run an app client on a separate machine from the server:  
this is a bigger problem, but we haven't had much demand for app  
clients yet.

If you are willing to live with these conditions until we fix them  
(or someone submits some patches, hint hint) then you can start a  
particular app client with a command line like

java -jar bin/client.jar <moduleId>

where module Id is the moduleId reported when you install the app  
client.  It will typically be of the form com.myCompany/myApplication/ 
1.0/car

Hope this helps,
david jencks



>
> Thanks for your time,
> Ryan Jaeb