Tag Archive for 'mod_jk'

glassfish in production

Published on June 3, 2007 in Sun Solaris and glassfish. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

To run an J2EE application server like glassfish in production brings a lot of additional work after installation. While a simple installation for developers is easy, it seems no so easy today to bring glassfish in production. From my point of view, there are at least the following things to do for a production installation:

  • Add new user and group (e.g. glassfish) to /etc/passwd /and /etc/group
  • install latest jdk
  • install glassfish
  • setup and install start/stop scripts (smf on Solaris10)
  • install glassfish apache 2.2 ajp integration (example1 example2 example3)
  • configure glassfish logfile rotation
  • tune glassfish because default settings are not suitable for production ( a lot of parameters!)
  • harden glassfish because default security settings are not strong and secure enough
  • deploy jdbc configuration (jars + settings)
  • write scripts to integrate glassfish in your monitoring framework
  • write scripts to integrate glassfish in your deployment framework (e.g. Sun N1 SPS)
  • and of of course, this list is not complete

Nowadays, we have at least three (virtual) servers for each customer project. One for development, one for test and ond for production. This means to install and modify glassfish at least three times. But often, we also have hardware based load balancing in projects, that means to have at least two strings of glassfish for dev/test/prod or six installations alltogether!

Looking at the new glassfish V2 feature called application server usage profiles shows, that the three offered profiles (“developer”, “cluster”, “enterprise”) still leaking real production settings. A simple “production” or production-cluster profile would be nice. The production profiles should have tuned values (at least the parameters mentioned in the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 PerformanceTuning Guide beginning on page 50) which makes it easier to setup glassfish for admins. The mentioned enterprise profile might be not the best for high traffic web 2.0 production web sites.

How do we do this job with other app servers? For a couple of customers, we’re using the Bea Weblogic Application Server. And we’re using the Sun N1 SPS Bea Weblogic module to install and configure Weblogic. N1 SPS also uses the possibility to run the WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) , which is a BEA tool for scripting the configuration of BEA WebLogic. WLST is a command-line scripting interface to monitor and manage BEA WebLogic Server instances and domains. The WLST scripting environment is based on the Java scripting interpreter, Jython.

Someting like this (GFST) would be cool to have for glassfish, too.

glassfish and apache

Published on May 27, 2007 in glassfish. 18 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Running a web server in front of a java application server makes sense in almost all production scenarios, where end users from the internet connect directly to your site. The web server offers you much more configuration, security and performance features than the integrated http connector of any java application server. Software developers sometimes argue, that it should work (and of course it does). But if you want to speed up your website and tune your weblayer with optimizing settings like cache-control headers, turn of Etags and so on, a java application server doesn’t allow you to modify this settings.

Therefore, web servers like apache httpd are running in front of the application server and you can configure almost everything you want with apache httpd and apache modules. The connections from apache to the java application server (cluster) are configured through additional apache modules. Commercial Vendors like BEA offers you apache modules for Weblogic to connect. For Tomcat we saw a lot of different modules over the last years. These were mod_jk, mod_webapp, mod_jk2 and the return of mod_jk. With apache 2.2, there’s a build in module, called mod_proxy_ajp. The connection from apache to tomcat with the mod_jk or the mod_proxy_ajp is done by the AJP protocol, which is a binary protocol and faster than http. Before apache 2.2 and its mod_proxy_ajp module, some people used mod_proxy as a revers proxy from apache to tomcat. This might be good for small web sites, and if you do not need to pass some additional informations to you app server.

Now to glassfish. Currently, glassfish V1 and V2 ships only with a http connector module. There’s no apache httpd mod_glassfish or something like that. You can connect with httpd’s mod_proxy_reverse.

But regarding some blog entries from Jean-Francois Arcand and Amy Roh, it’s possible to extend glassfish with the libs ( tomcat-ajp.jar modeler-1.1.jar commons-logging-1.0.4.jar) from tomcat and tweak some config files.
But stop. Are there different versions of these jars? Which jar version fits to which glassfish version?

Some people already blogged about their problems to extend glassfish withe the ajp protocol.

Why does the glassfish distribution currently do not bundle the ajp libs and missing configurations in the config files?

In my opinion, it is very very important for the future success of glassfish, to offer build in connectors to apache (with ajp), to Sun JES Web Server (an NSAPI Module?) and MS IIS . These connectors should be well documented and easy to configure for admins and developers.