I think this is a great idea. I doubt we can host it at apache.....
unless we do something like bsd + harmony (not even sure if that is
likely to work)
thanks
david jencks
On Dec 15, 2008, at 12:01 AM, Jason Dillon wrote:
I've been playing around with VMWare, trying to optimize my
virtualization configuration, and it occurred to me that folks who
are savvy to the virtualization concept might benefit from having a
linux+openjdk+geronimo appliance ready to "play with" perhaps
another which is "ready for enterprise configuration".
From an Apache POV its another distribution, specific to a
virtualization tool, like VMWare, but users who already have the
required tools installed, can basically download + install + run,
and they have a functional environment...
IMO this is really nice as it drops a ton of evil platform issues
(er ya *F*-windows) but also can resolve issues about which JDK did
you install and did you configure your JAVA_HOME, blah, blah, blah.
There are a ton of problems a newbie might run into when trying to
play around with Geronimo as we all know.
Granted, not everyone is going to have a virtualization environment
setup, but some will I'm sure... probably even the more savvy users
I would guess (and well we can probably give docs to explain how to
setup some virt stuff too if needed). But those who do, we can
deliver them highly functionally images for "playing" or images
tailored for enterprise consumption. That might be one which is
bare-minimum for folks that need a starting point to roll uber-
custom configurations (perhaps with a nice build env setup already
for them, primed with repo artifacts) or one for users that want to
deploy clustered ejb+web applications, and then another for simple
web apps.
Seems to me that the advantage here is that you can configure the
server and provide simple admin+user documentation on a known
quantity... that being the VM which we publish for them. That VM
*should* perform *approximately* the same on any non-virtual host
configuration (assuming we craft the image correctly). But, okay
I'm no math genius, but from my perspective... lets say 10x users
have a problem due to config stuff right now, maybe 1-2x might have
a problem with the image (its damn easy to setup a VM-configuration
these days, and also damn easy to install an image).
So, *assuming* that folks are savvy with VM-technology, it might
very well be *easier* to provide a VM image pre-configured for their
evaluation/exploration of Geronimo.
I don't really expect folks to use that image for production, but I
would expect them to learn from then image to build their production
environment, perhaps even copying the configuration from the image
as a bootstrap (and I think we should provide docs on how to do
that). Though for some folks, the image (say the simple webapp
image) might work just fine.
I've seen a lot of mails about system dependent problems... windows
especially, damn I hate that platform... but there are other
problems too. Like folks on Redhat who don't uninstall the crappy
GNU java muck and manually install the sun/ibm JDK, etc. So I'm not
just hating on windows (though you and I both know I really, really,
really... really hate it).
* * *
Bottom line is that I think use of virtual machines is becoming more
popular. I think it would be beneficial to Geronimo if we provided
one (or more) virtual machines images to showcase Geronimo's full
power... and reduce the myriad of complications some initial users
run into why running locally on their own systems. And furthermore,
we can provide more customized images which fully exploit the full
power of the system, without having to go and complicate our build
(create new assemblies, slowing down build/dev times, etc).
After writing all this, I think the only real issue is, since we are
part of Apache and this would technically be considered some sort
of *release* artifact... who does including Linux (whatever distro)
jive with the ASF legally?
I believe its a good idea... obviously or I would not have wasted
the time to try and explain my thoughts to you. But I'm unsure that
the ASF can allow for such things, short of an ASF operating-system
coming into existence (which I'm neither counting on, nor hope
happens). Perhaps a separate sourceforge or code.google project
might suite better for legal issues?
Anyways, seems like a good idea, I'd like to see it happen, its not
that hard... what do you folks think?
--jason
