The Glassfish Application Server

1
The Glassfish Application Server

• Carlton Northern
• CS775
• 4/22/08

2
Introduction

• Glassfish is an open-source, Java EE compliant
  application server.
• The Sun Java System Application Server is Suns
  commercial offering of Glassfish.
• But what is an application server?

3
Application Servers

• Application servers deliver applications to
  client-computers through HTTP.
• They differ from web servers in their extensive
  use of server-side dynamic content and
  integration with databases.
• Typically, application servers perform the
  business logic and data access for web
  applications.
• Example Apache Tomcat, JBOSS

4
Three-Tier Architecture

• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageOverview_of_a_t
  hree-tier_application.png

5
Why Use an Application Server?

• Question Web servers can perform all the
  functionality of a an application server through
  extensions like Apache Axis, so why are
  application servers necessary?
• Answer Application servers provide the necessary
  abstraction and decoupling from web servers to
  allow for greater interoperability and
  portability.

6
Glassfish Features

• Support for
• Java EE
• Ruby on Rails
• PHP
• AJAX
• Metro (a web services stack)
• CORBA
• Many many different frameworks
• Clustering
• Grouping
• Load-Balancing
• Data Replication
• Complete Web GUI Administration
• Integration with NetBeans and Eclipse

7
Clustering

• Glassfish allows for the clustering of
  application server instances.
• Instances can be on the same or different
  machines.
• A cluster provides a runtime environment in which
  one or more Java EE applications can be run.
• Clusters provide high availability by using
  failover and load-balancing.
• Server instances can be added to a cluster, even
  while the application is running making
  clustering scalable.

8
High Availability

• The High Availability feature in Glassfish
  provides 99.999 availability for applications.
• High Availability is offered through
• High Availability Session Persistence
• High Availability Message Service
• RMI-IIOP Load-Balancing and Failover

9
High Availability Session Persistence

• Provides high availability of HTTP requests and
  session data.
• Useful for mission critical web applications like
  shopping carts.
• Provides this through
• In-memory replication of state data on other
  servers in the cluster
• Using High Availability Database (HADB) (outside
  of scope of this presentation)

10
In-memory Replication of Session Data

• Replicates HTTP session data and stateful session
  beans (SFSBs) in the memory of server instances
  on other machines.
• Allows for preserving the state of an application
  over server failures.
• This requires the Group Management Service (GMS)
• GMS allows for notification of failures in a
  group and can take action.

11
High Availability Java Message Service (JMS)

• JMS is an API that allow Java EE applications to
  create, send, receive and read messages.

12
Web App Deployment Demo

• http//maeik.com8080/LastFlickrGWT/

13
Web GUI Administration Demo

• http//localhost4848/