The Glassfish Application Server

1
The Glassfish Application Server

• Carlton Northern
• CS775
• 4/22/08

2
Overview

• Introduction
• Application Servers 101
• Web Application Demo
• Glassfish Features
• Netbeans and Glassfish Integration Demo
• Glassfish Web GUI Administration Demo
• Questions
• References

3
Introduction

• Glassfish is an open-source, Java Enterprise
  Edition (EE) compliant application server.
• The Sun Java System Application Server is Suns
  commercial offering of Glassfish.
• Glassfish V1 is the reference implementation of
  J2EE 1.4.
• Glassfish V2 is the reference implementation of
  Java EE 5 (in other words J2EE 1.5).
• But what is an application server?

4
Application Servers 101

• Application servers deliver applications to
  client-computers through HTTP.
• They differ from web servers in their extensive
  use of server-side dynamic content and
  integration with databases.
• Typically, application servers perform the
  business logic and data access for web
  applications.
• Example Apache Tomcat, JBOSS

5
Three-Tier Architecture

• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageOverview_of_a_t
  hree-tier_application.png

6
Why Use an Application Server?

• Question Web servers can perform all the
  functionality of a an application server through
  extensions like Apache Axis, so why are
  application servers necessary?
• Answer Application servers provide the necessary
  abstraction and decoupling from web servers to
  allow for greater interoperability and
  portability.
• App servers have standard ways to communicate to
  web servers, called servlets.
• App servers use containers to deploy applications.

7
Web App Deployment Demo

• http//localhost8080/LastFlickrGWT/

8
Glassfish Features

• Support for
• Java EE
• Ruby on Rails
• PHP
• AJAX
• Metro (a web services stack)
• CORBA
• Many many different frameworks
• Multiple levels of use.
• Clustering
• Grouping
• Load-Balancing
• Data Replication
• Complete Web GUI Administration
• Integration with NetBeans and Eclipse

9
Metro Web Services Stack
10
Web Services Interoperability Technologies (WSIT)
11
Multiple Level Use

• Glassfish separates functionality so that the
  user only uses what is needed.
• Each profile builds upon the functionality of the
  previous.
• Developer profile used for development of
  applications.
• Enterprise profile used for deployment and high
  availability of applications without cluster
  support.
• Cluster profile used for clustering support.

12
Clustering

• Glassfish allows for the clustering of
  application server instances.
• Instances can be on the same or different
  machines.
• A cluster provides a runtime environment in which
  one or more Java EE applications can be run.
• Clusters provide high availability by using
  failover and load-balancing.
• Server instances can be added to a cluster, even
  while the application is running making
  clustering extremely scalable.

13
High Availability

• The High Availability feature in Glassfish
  provides 99.999 availability for applications.
• High Availability is offered through
• High Availability Session Persistence
• High Availability Message Service
• RMI-IIOP Load-Balancing and Failover

14
High Availability Session Persistence

• Provides high availability of HTTP requests and
  session data.
• Useful for mission critical web applications like
  shopping carts.
• Provides this through
• In-memory replication of state data on other
  servers in the cluster
• Using High Availability Database (HADB) (outside
  of scope of this presentation)

15
In-memory Replication of Session Data

• Replicates HTTP session data and stateful session
  beans (SFSBs) in the memory of server instances
  on other machines.
• Allows for preserving the state of an application
  over server failures.
• This requires the Group Management Service (GMS)
• GMS allows for notification of failures in a
  group and can take action.

16
High Availability Java Message Service (JMS)

• JMS is an API that allow Java EE applications to
  create, send, receive and read messages.
• JMS allows message delivery semantics like once
  and only once delivery and also message ordering.
• JMS is made highly available through connection
  pooling, failover and clustering.
• Connection pooling is the act of caching
  frequently used connections to a service rather
  than discarding them after each use.
• JMS instances are clustered in a peer-to-peer
  relationship utilizing a common data store
  (HADB).
• These clusters utilize GMS and therefore can take
  advantage of failover.

17
Netbeans Glassfish Integration

• Demonstration in Netbeans

18
Web GUI Administration Demo

• http//localhost4848/

19
Questions

• QA

20
References

• http//docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1343.5
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_(computing
  )
• https//glassfish.dev.java.net/
• http//www.netbeans.org/