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From: Stefan Arentz <stefan.arentz@norad.org>
Subject: Re: Module restructure
Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 20:10:49 +0200
To: dev@geronimo.apache.org

On May 27, 2005, at 6:07 PM, Jeremy Boynes wrote:

> Stefan brings up the question of whether we want to release sub- 
> modules of Geronimo separately. I think this is a good idea and  
> would propose the following restructure of the tree to move in this  
> direction.

Let me just explain my motivation a bit, maybe that will also help  
for the plan.

In my original email I said something about not needing all the J2EE  
stuff. I exaggerated a bit of course, but most of the applications  
that I have been writing in the last couple of years are done mostly  
with a subset of the whole J2EE umbrella. Some apps were just some  
network service wrapped in (JMX) beans, a service exposed with Spring  
(Burlap, XML-RPC) other apps were simply a web app backed by a shared  
Spring context. I've never needed all the stuff in J2EE.

So far I've always done this on JBoss. Their MBean stuff works ok,  
but I wish it was easier to 'downsize' jboss to just a container with  
the stuff I need. That never really seemed to be their goal however.  
The complexity of their configuration files shows that.

So, what I would really like to see wrt Geronimo is an absolute  
minimal server with add-on packages for things like a web container,  
jms provider, etc. You want to host a web app? Throw in the Tomcat or  
Jetty personality. Need JMS too, add ActiveMQ. Persistence? Simply  
add a hibernate deployer. Mix and match so that it does what your app  
needs.

This is where Geronimo could shine and even take away a large chunk  
of Tomcat; most people just want to deploy their web app and  
optionally add some more services without having to understand a full  
J2EE stack. Geronimo can fill that void extremely well I think.  
(Simple Web Container .. <VOID> .. J2EE Monolith)

Ok so just complaining doesn't work well for this project, so what I  
really would like to do is start figuring out how I can give Geronimo  
'personalities' for popular combinations of technology. Like,

  - Geronimo Kernel + Tomcat + JSTL2.0 + Spring + Hibernate
  - Geronimo Kernel + Web Services
  - Geronimo Kernel + JMX Enabled custom network service

and then do some writing about it on the wiki. Make recipes for  
people, or even complete packages that are downloadable.

I really think this is how Geronimo can also get acceptance with a  
much larger crowd.

  S.