JOnAS, TWiki, Qexo, ...
I installed three software systems today. And I had three experiences.
First comes JOnAS. I promised I'll look into this Open Source J2EE 1.3 application server fifteen days ago.
So far my impression of JOnAS 3.2 has been positive:
- It comes with top quality documentation that prints out to 203 pages.
- The installation process is sensible and easy to fathom.
- The documentation matches the product. (You can't imagine how much I appreciated this.)
- All the samples compile and run as expected. (Except for the entity bean example that requires JDBC, which I haven't set up yet.)
- The admin console looks really nice.
Compared to JBoss 3.2.1, which runs this site, I would only miss stub-less deployment and hot-redeployment. This was made up by the nice startup/shutdown and admin scripts.
Then comes TWiki. Eric Burke thinks it is the way to go for online software project related documentation.
It too comes with voluminous documentation. (And if you know me, you know I'm going to print it out. It prints out to 144 pages.) However, the documentation misses the mark in many ways. Sometimes it's too specific ("create a directory c:/twiki"). Sometimes it's too vague ("use mod_ntlm for IE users"). But at the end, I had it running on a Windows 2000 Server with Apache HTTP Server 1.3.22 and cygwin. Not a trivial feat.
I have to install a few pieces of Perl functionality through CPAN. And I have to admit that CPAN is reusable components done right. Now if only us Java people could have something like CPAN.
Finally a few words for Qexo, the GNU Kawa implementation of XQuery. The kawa-1.7.jar (1.3MB) packs incredible power!
Imagine JSP pages that aren't translated to Java source files, written to the file system, and then compiled to class files, and finally loaded into the servlet container. The Kawa Pages are compiled with the Kawa compiler in memory and then directly loaded into the JVM.
It could only mean---speed!