What are the best web server for learning?

[Rajkumar Masanaiyan]

Hello,

I have started learning Servlet & JSP and would like to install a web server that may be integrated with a app server and finally a persistence framework as I progress. Would you please recommend a good framework to start with?

I have received recommendation to install Tomcat. If I install tomcat, what should be my app server?

Another question that may not be belong to this forum but is a logical extension to the above queries. I am getting recommendation to study spring instead of EJB. While there may be different opinions on this, I would like to get a sense of from this forum.

Thanks,
Ravi

[Vic Hood]

Tomcat should do be good enough for you it doubles as both the web server and the application server and is perfect for newbies.
Regarding your second question , I suggest you stick to Spring over EJB because its far less complicated when compared to the latter.

[Tim Moores]

+1 for Tomcat.

While I, too, would advise not to jump into EJBs unless you have to, learning Spring is not necessarily the best alternative. It depends on what you want to do - if you're interested in persistence, then the JPA API would be a better start.

[Vishal Trivedi]

TomCat is very good indeed for start ...
You can top it up with eclispe....n you will have fun doing your codes.

And yes regarding 2nd question do not jump into it unless you have to...

but however ejb3 is lot easier then earlier versions though(that is what i believe)....
However i think earlier versions on TomCat do not support EJB but thats not the question right now....

[Tim Holloway]

Spring and EJB are not mutually exclusive. Spring is a bean management and wiring framework that includes various extensions designed to make common architectural designs much easier.

EJB is an ORM persistence mechanism. EJB3 and JPA are, for most practical purposes the same thing, since JPA is part of the EBJ3 spec. Tomcat's main lack compared to more ambitious app servers such as JBoss and WebSphere is that it doesn't have built-in EJB support, but JPA works quite well in Tomcat.

[William Brogden]

Another great advantage of Tomcat is that you can get the full source code with JavaDocs - ideal for learning the details and answering questions.

The examples are pretty useful also.

Bill

[Rajkumar Masanaiyan]

Tim Moores wrote:+1 for Tomcat.

While I, too, would advise not to jump into EJBs unless you have to, learning Spring is not necessarily the best alternative. It depends on what you want to do - if you're interested in persistence, then the JPA API would be a better start.

Thanks all for your inputs.

After mastering JSP / Servlet, I want to learn web services and REST services. Keeping aside EJB, what are the alternatives to spring?

[Rajkumar Masanaiyan]

Tim Holloway wrote:Spring and EJB are not mutually exclusive. Spring is a bean management and wiring framework that includes various extensions designed to make common architectural designs much easier.

EJB is an ORM persistence mechanism. EJB3 and JPA are, for most practical purposes the same thing, since JPA is part of the EBJ3 spec. Tomcat's main lack compared to more ambitious app servers such as JBoss and WebSphere is that it doesn't have built-in EJB support, but JPA works quite well in Tomcat.

I thought Session Bean / Message Driven Bean equivalent is spring and Entity Bean / JPA persistence provider is equivalent to ORM frameworks. Isn't that correct?

[Tim Moores]

Ravisankar Sivasubramaniam wrote:After mastering JSP / Servlet, I want to learn web services and REST services. Keeping aside EJB, what are the alternatives to spring?

Not sure why you'd mention EJB in the context of WS, but the obvious starting point is the Jersey library (the reference implementation of the JAX-RS API). I'd stay away from SOAP-based WS until you're sure that you'll actually need it; it's not trivial to jump in, and is in many places being replaced or surpassed by RESTful services.

[Daniel Doboseru]

@Tim: Partially disagree with you here I learned SOAP based WS from scratch just in 2-3 days. It might seem complicated because it's a new protocol, and a new language for transmission (WSDL), but is not so scary, because you can find libraries (as you very well said JAX-RS for instance) that will do all the hard-work for you (serializing the messages, deserializing, mapping data-types etc), so basically, to send a message to a web-service become as easy as using a System.out.print and receiving one as getting text from a text-field.

[Tim Moores]

You're right that SOAP itself isn't hard, and that tooling makes getting a service up and running easier. But that's not what I was referring to. I was talking more about the step from having "a service" up to having "a production-ready service" up - for which things like WS-I and WS-Security come into play. Furthermore, look through these forums to see how many folks struggle to get from a service that runs inside their IDE to a service that runs on a production server. Plus, with all due respect, I doubt that you learned WSDL in a couple of days :-) Enough for simple services - possibly, but its intricacies - unlikely.

[Daniel Doboseru]

Yes, you're right, the things can go pretty ugly when moving to advanced features and operations, but as he initially said, he's just a beginner, so it won't be a harm to take a look at SOAP WSs. And about the WSDL, you were right, I haven't learned WSDL in a few days, only had an introduction to know how to handle it ..although my XML knowledge helped a lot.