Where does JBoss fit in?

[peter_ullah]

Hi,

Im new to j2ee development and have a few questions, if anyone can help!

Basically how do the various J2ee technologies fit together/complement each other?

As I understand it, we have application servers such as JBoss (....and WebSphere, BEA etc)

but products like Spring also exist, which dont appear to be App Servers, but do provide Messaging, EJB alternatives etc, and various other features which JBoss provides so is Spring a replacement, or does Spring offer some of the features of JBoss, but still requires an application server to host the services?!!?!?!? very confusing for me.

Also..... there are many presentation technologies such as JSF, JSP, Struts, and Spring(?) but how do they get supported by an Application server, can you use all of these technologies with JBoss?

Do all Application Servers provide a proprietary implementation of the J2ee standard technologies?

I just need a place to go where I can get a "big picture" overview of how all of this fits together!

Can anyone help me?

Thank you

[dpansica]

I try to explain what i know:

J2EE is basically a specification that estabilish how to construct web application but not only.

Application Server like Jboss, WebSphere, Tomcat and others are compliant to J2EE.

Framework like Struts or Spring help you to configure and develop web application based on servlet which are some of the basically element which j2ee web application relies on.

To understand better how they works i suggest this article which starts from some definition of a j2ee application:

http://www.springframework.org/docs/MVC-step-by-step/Spring-MVC-step-by-step.html

I hope that it can help you.

Diego

[peter_ullah]

Thanks Diego,

that was quite interesting, but I was more interested in undertanding when and where to sue each technology, and how they fit together.

I understand that all J2EE App Servers provide support for Servlets, JSP, Messaging etc, but I was realy wondering if you had to use something like JBoss or Websphere to host things like Spring!

Any ideas?

[dpansica]

Spring is composed by some jar that you include in your j2ee project to give it some functionality, then you can package your application and deploy it to Application server. These are only words which can mean nothing, if you try to follow the step by step i gave you, i'm sure you understand more.

[patrickmulligan]

That is a really really big question to answer. I would suggest starting out on the Sun site and start with the three SDKs, J2ME, J2SE, and J2EE, which essentially all build upon each other.

Then from there you can see different packages that have been developed for diffent SDKs levels.