Thursday 31 December 2009

Better the devil you know?

As a professional software developer I sometimes find myself having to defend decisions made, when the inevitable unexpected problems arise.

A few months ago I was pleased when the decision was made to move away from the JBoss portal server implementation, to a more open platform which would run directly on Tomcat 6. Leaving the office on Christmas eve with two known potential show-stoppers was not my ideal way to start a holiday.

This week has supposedly knocked one of those out but will still involve change and the uncertainty of another upgrade.

The less important issue of the combination of multiple JSF-backed forms in separate portlets on a single page still needs to be dealt with.

It seems like every second day a different person has queried the team about why we moved away from something that worked. I'm trying to stay positive and optimistic that we will have fewer issues with configuring aspects such as load balancing, but a part of me is hoping that someone else gets the task of configuring the clustering.

2 comments:

  1. Clustering is not just about configuration, this is why we've put a lot of stress on that aspect on JBoss Portal and its successor (GateIn). It is also why it runs primarly on an application server with JBoss Transaction Manager and replication capabilities.

    That said GateIn runs on both JBoss AS and Tomcat with different configurations though, depending on users need.

    Hope this helps.

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  2. Thanks for the comment Thomas.

    I saw GateIn on the horizon and suggested it as an option to my colleagues when Liferay was proving tricky to integrate for a proof of concept several months back.

    The "beta" version in the name was a bit of a turn-off in the end, but if I could demonstrate some robust JSF 1.x support then it may not be too late to use it for our next project :)

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