I just got off a call with David Blevins in which we were discussing TomEE. It turns out that we both feel that TomEE should provide a VM for deployment on Azure. Such a VM can be used to demo the capabilities of TomEE, it can also be used as a quickstart for people wanting to build applications on TomEE.
There is a resource called VM Depot [1] which provides a community managed repository of freely redistributable virtual machine images. It costs nothing to publish and store images on VM Depot. To build and test the image (or to deploy a VM from the image) one does need an Azure subscription. Fortunately there are free subscriptions for users and committers to ASF projects get free MSDN subscriptions which include enough Azure time. I see from http://openejb.apache.org/comparison.html that there are three distinct distributions of TomEE. I suggest creating a bare bones VM for each along with a demo VM for each (assuming there are sensible demo applications that you could include). But I also suggest focusing on whichever you feel is most important to your community first. I'd like to offer my help in understanding what it means to create an image on VM Depot. If there is anyone in the community that would like to build the images I'd be very happy to provide whatever guidance and support is needed. Once the images are up there I'd love to work with the community to ensure the message gets out there too - which is where I should identify my affiliation. I work for MS Open Technologie, inc. and am responsible for VM Depot. As such I can't build your images for you (that just wouldn't scale) but I can help you make the most of any images that are up there. If you have questions fire away, if you want to have a crack at creating the first image let me know and I'll start feeding you the instructions, it's really easy. Essentially: - Create a Linux VM (either using a node.js command line or the Azure web portal) - Install TomEE (via SSH) - [optional] install demo's, tutorials, source and anything else you want to include on the image - Deprovision the VM (a single command via SSH) - Publish to VM Depot The whole process takes about 20 minutes plus TomEE installation time (there are a couple of periods of waiting for images to copy etc. but this is unattended so doesn't eat into your time). Ross [1] http://vmdepot.msopentech.com
