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can we replace Glassfish with Tomcat/OpenEJB for lighter applications? What is the performance of OpenEJB comparing to glassfish as EJB container.
What is the restrictions of OpenEJB instead of glassfish?
Regards
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Note that Hani's comment was in regards to Geronimo 1.0/OpenEJB 2.0. Hani was wrong in the frankenstein comment as the OpenEJB 2.x codebase was built entirely from scratch for Geronimo and as a result it only ran in Geronimo; the embedded, tomcat, and standalone modes were all lost. We found Hani's comment was right in that the performance was not good.
For OpenEJB 3.x we abandoned the 2.x codebase and picked things up from where we left off in OpenEJB 1.x and brought it up to EJB 3.0 certification. 2.x and 3.x share no code. OpenEJB 3.x turned out very well and the project has been growing pretty rapidly since the first 3.0 release in 2008. The EJB 3.1 Embedded Container and EJBs in .wars features came from OpenEJB. We had the first @Singleton implementation and hope to complete the rest of EJB 3.1 and certify web profile by Q4 this year. Failover and JMX monitoring have been under heavy development since January, are now complete, and will be released in 3.1.3 in a couple weeks. The failover is actually second generation, the first failover support was released in 3.1.1. There was significant remote performance work done in the 3.1.1 release as well bringing RPC calls up to a mean of 7300 TPS in our benchmarking.
Less important to some, but very important to others, Apache OpenEJB is not a corporately controlled open source project. The majority of committers are users who have earned commit and use OpenEJB at work. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but the bottom line is OpenEJB is filled with people who love it and use it and the community is just as open as the source.
In October 2011, we obtained Java EE 6 Web Profile certification with "Tomcat+OpenEJB", now called Apache TomEE.
Certified and with a clearer name, we hope this makes the stack easier to both understand and compare.
On a personal note, I view the comments in this thread as one of the major motivators for taking the certification step. Thank you to everyone at StackOverlfow for feedback which I find both encouraging and grounding. Connecting with this community has resulted in so much positive change in OpenEJB/TomEE.
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I guess the question is about the runtime environment but still, I don't understand what lighter application does mean. Memory footprint? Startup time? Deployment time? What problem do you actually have? And please define light.
For what it's worth, I consider GlassFish 3 as a light runtime and my experience with it is very positive. From the product data sheet:
Oracle GlassFish Server 3 implements the OSGi runtime, which allows features to be dynamically added to the Java server as needed, and for the smallest possible Java stack to be deployed to support applications. This helps to keep the footprint as small as possible by loading only the modules required to service deployed applications—improving startup time and reducing resource utilization.
Second, I personally don't like the Frankenstein approach, I believe that the glue between all parts that you get with a real application server is part of the added value, that's actually why I use an app server.
Third, I never benched OpenEJB, I used it for testing only and never planned to use it for production, mostly because of its bad reputation. See this comment about Geronimo's performances on TSS (from Hani Suleiman, don't be surprised if it's caustic):
I'd imagine that saying that the EJB tier is 'acceptable' is about the nicest thing you could say.
From what I know, geronimo's ejb code is based off openEJB, which has, historically, bean the worst container you could possibly find. You'd have to look pretty hard to find it too, only to be filled with various degrees of regret/rage once you achieve that dubious goal.
It's not surprising that G's performance will always be sub-par. The frankenstein approach of software building is a great recipe for bad performance. Sure, you'll have lots of pretty diagrams, great looking dependency graphs, and loose coupling. All of which are fairly irrelevant to users who want a coherent appserver that they can treat as a black box.
Things might have changed, OpenEJB has probably improved, at least a bit, but still:
For all these reasons, I wouldn't consider Tomcat+OpenEJB instead of GlassFish, especially if there is no problem to solve.
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In my brief tests, I found glassfish not light enough for my needs (startup time and memory usage). I have been happy with openejb so far.
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