simple path from JRUN / IIS to JBoss / Apache

[jim_stoll]

"jim_stoll" wrote:

"jim_stoll" wrote:
hi !

i am new to JBoss and i need some advice

i have a requirement to bring in JBoss and Apache to replace JRun4 and IIS. What is spec'ed is simply to port our application over. Our application runs using JBuilder 6 to compile directly into the JRun default server/web-INF/Classes directory. When this project started about 4 years ago ANT and STRUTS were not even on the radar.

Is there any simple way to continue on the venue ? That is is there any way we can avoid Struts and Ant and still get our code to run ?

I already have prepared management for the possibility that we might have to $ upgrade our IDE... what i want to avoid is a long learning cycle in switching to JBoss < as in learning ANT and making our code conform to Struts >... too costly considering the number of developers vs budget we have.

Any thoughts on this will be cherished

Jim Stoll
Lead Developer
Joint Logistics Warfare Initative

[nmartel]

"nmartel@ll" wrote:

"nmartel@ll" wrote:
Your application might run under JBoss with some moderate amount of word. Just how much work is in front of you depends on how coupled you are to IIS and JRUN. If you followed a pure-Java coding paradigm and you conformed to SUN J2SDK1.3 you are a good part of the way there.

The hit you will definitely take will be in the human interface side of things. Unless you are generating HTML and/or JSP to serve up pages, you will likely have some work to do. If you built a client or human interface as a pure Swing application, again you are nearly there.

As for ANT, you don't necessarily need to use ANT. ANT is just a MAKE tool that is designed to be Java centric. When coupled with a robust IDE like ECLIPSE, the two give you a powerful build environment. The learning curve for us to use ANT was a couple of weeks (assumes you know Make, NMake, or similar structured build tool).

As for STRUTS, this is an open-source model-view-controller (MVC) framework. The code allows you to construct applications quickly and separate the presentation of user data from the business logic from the storage paradigm.

STRUTS has been improved on with a graphical user interface package that plays nicely with STRUTS (the package is appropriately named Velocity). The concept here is that tags are generated and used to build your displays and these are substitued by real elements and data at runtime by the framework and app server.

The learning curve on STRUTS was about 1 month, getting truly productive with STRUTS was about 3 months. The book "Struts Kick Start" as found to be very helpful.