[wsas-java-dev] positioning of wsas "embeddable" version

[Ajith Ranabahu]

Hi,
My perspective is that the embeddable version would be the more
appealing version for the enterprise customer (and even for the average
developer. I'm sure most of the developers have tomcat or similar
servlet container running in their machines. Judging by the mailing
lists for Axis2 - which I believe is equally applicable to WSAS - we can
definitely say the major interest is in the embeddable version. FYI some
guys here didn't have a clue that Axis2/WSAS ships with a default server!)

I would say the standalone version (at the current state) would be
appealing to a developer just to have a feeling about or perhaps
develop/debug on it for a while. But actual deployment is more likely to
happen on an industry grade server, at least tomcat.

As a suggestion while putting the embeddable version in the front, would
it be worth to have a more robust standalone version based on tomcat ?
I'm sure tomcat can be stripped down to a bare minimum and WSAS attached
to it without much effort [We do have tomcat experts around. Both Amila
and Sandakith do know all the ins and outs of tomcat :)]. This can be
shipped as a complete server package (of course with the modules
preconfigured) to any of the interested parties who want to start from
scratch. We can even admit that we are using the 'proven tomcat
platform', which certainly will be better received than commons HTTP  :)

Ajith

Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> I've been wondering lately whether we're over-positioning the standalone
> version compared to the version that runs on top of
> JBoss/WL/WAS/Geronimo etc..
> 
> The reason is that the standalone version is a disruptive story. That
> is, customers have to put up our *server* as a key part of their mission
> critical infrastructure. That's a harder sell than say putting up a bit
> of code in their already running server platform.
> 
> A HUGE advantage we have over the WS stacks of any *one* of
> JBoss/WL/WAS/etc. is that ours runs on all of them. Many customers have
> more than one of these app servers in production and having a single
> high performant WS-* stack that works the same on all of them would be
> quite valuable as they don't have to muck around with app-server
> specific details. This is especially awesome once we start performing
> better than JBoss-WS on JBoss etc..
> 
> What do you think? We need to work on adjusting the PR and messaging if
> we're to make the "embeddable" version more appealing ... starting with
> coming up with a better name for it.
> 
> Sanjiva.