“Many new and veteran developers are hopping onto the ever-growing Apache Geronimo bandwagon. Thus, the ability to build Geronimo is becoming increasingly important to developers who want to incorporate changes or full-custom modules. Unfortunately, building Geronimo is no trivial task. It requires learning new build scripts and companion build applications. Luckily, you can follow this step-by-step guide to understand exactly how to build the Apache Geronimo source code from scratch.”
Alllll that text, and not a single line actually describing what the heck Apache Geronimo is and what sets it apart from regular Apache (or is it regular Apache? We may never know).
Geronimo is the newest one of the J2EE application servers.
Probably not very interesting unless you do serious server side development.
It is really excellent stuff, but unless you do not know what J2EE is, forget about it 😉
Anyway in the J2EE community Geronimo currently makes huge inroads, because, first of all it is high quality and secondly it is under the very liberal Apache2 license, the project was heavily funded by IBM and it is very likely that future Websphere Application Servers might be based on the codebase.
I thought it to be of a more bean than app server thing, along the lines of say, jboss vs. tomcat and the first really wide open hold the religion license bean server with the licensing being the real earth shaking news.
Strange bit is in the final phase of java enterprise server evolution they will all probably look like enhydra and we’ll discover the French had it right all along.
Outside of the J2EE community geronimo still might be of some interest, you have some benefits even if you do not use it as an app server.
A derby database comes with it out of the box, you also can use it as a proxy for webservers behind it out of the box. If you want to use it as a normal webserver you should at least know how to build a war file and how to dump it into a certain dir, or to deploy it via the integrated admin console.
Enhydra is less the blueprint for J2EE Apples webobjects is.
J2EE with 1.5 now finally starts to be in the shape of surpassing Webobjects.
(Geronimo is J2EE 1.4 btw)