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On The Edge! -NEW-
Commercial Vendors

We are happy to announce the first beta milestone release of
Enhydra
Enterprise (EE). The prebuilt package is available
immediately from
http://enterprise.enhydra.org/software/downloads/index.html
We encourage
evaluators and developers using 'alpha' versions to change
to this version.

Enhydra Enterprise represents the next generation of
application server. It
is structured as an "operating system of the Internet," with
a kernel that
provides some essential facilities and a mechanism for
selecting additional
services to provide configurable platform functionality. We
call the overall
structure the Enhydra Services Architecture (ESA). ESA
services can be
deployed at runtime, and started on demand. This allows the
deployer to
choose just the services required for a particular
deployment, and supports
runtime upgrading of services. We aim to offer a trading
post for ESA
services, and we encourage the contribution of services to
the community.

In this milestone build we have aggregated a set of
API-implementing
services on top of the J2SE 1.3 platform, providing many of
those APIs
required by the J2EE[TM] specification: Servlet 2.2, JSP[TM]
1.1, EJB[TM]
1.1, JNDI[TM] 1.2, JDBC[TM] 2.0 with optional package,
JTA[TM] 1.0.1. The
configuration includes other APIs, as well as services for
deployment,
service initialization, and versioned library support. This
sample
configuration lets you write portable enterprise-scale
applications.

You can imagine many different configurations and platforms
being built on
the Enhydra Enterprise project modular architecture. For
example, one
collection of ESA services might be equivalent to Enhydra
3.x today (perhaps
JNDI, JDBC, and Servlet/JSP Container). Another collection
of services might
be a communications server (perhaps JNDI, SOAP, BXXP,
XML/RPC, etc).
Finally, yet another might be a messaging server (perhaps
JNDI, JMS, etc).
When you add a new service to the EE platofrm, that new
service can be
available to some or all of the applications running on the
platform;
visibility is under your per-application control. We hope
that the ability
to create new cross-application services will allow for us
all to benefit
from radical customization of the concept of what an
application server is
and can be.

What It Does:

The beta 1 configuration of EE provides services and APIs
needed by
web-interfaced applications (as described abAlso, tve). It
can be run on a
range of deployment configurations, from standalone laptop
to multi-tier
multi-machine setups. It includes its own web server, or it
can be connected
to a third-party web server front end. EE also includes the
complete Enhydra
Application Framework from previous Enhydra versions (most
recently Enhydra
3.1); the XMLC ver 2.0 tool for separating web page
presentation design from
dynamic data programming; and the Kelp toolset for building
applications in
third-party IDEs. There are several examples included
showing how to run
J2EE-style applications (including Sun's PetStore demo app)
and how to write
your own services. We have run this configuration on Windows
NT/2000, RedHat
Linux 6.1, and Solaris 2.7.

The server maintains all configuration information directly
in a persistent
JNDI namespace for unified management and rapid system
restart. Server
management is provided through JMX-compatible MBeans,
exposed through the
Enhydra Web Console. This release begins integration of the
Enhydra
Authorization and Authentication Library (EAAL) which will
provide JAAS-like
security throughout the server, even when we incorporate
J2SE1.2 support.

What It Doesn't Do Yet:

Some of the EE Alpha 4 codebase has not yet been ported to
the new ESA-based
server: most importantly, JMS is not yet available. The J2EE
API set is not
yet complete. Some capabilities are only partially
implemented (in the
security work, for example, permission checking is only
partially
implemented, we need more LoginModules, and the toolset is
not yet started).
We need to complete the J2EE set of capabilities as a proof
of adequacy of
the server, and add more samples as proof of flexibility.
Specific current
versions and limitations are listed in the Release Notes,
and should be
reflected in the ongoing TODO.txt list.

What You Can Do:

We hope the Enhydra community will lend a hand in shaking
down and building
up the new server; there is room for contribution in every
part of the
effort. As you begin to use the server, please note bugs and
what needs to
be made better, and tell us on the
mailto:enhydraenterprise@enhydra.org mail
list - or fix it yourself (see the various Working Groups to
discuss and
coordinate your specific technical activities). When you get
a new
configuration working, please send an email describing your
setup to the
mail list, or the Documentation Working Group. As you run
across the need
for a service or tool, build it and see how the server
handles it - and tell
the community what we need to change in the Enhydra Serviecs
Architecture. A
Service Developer's Guide is coming from the Documentation
Working Group -
see
http://enterprise.enhydra.org/project/workingGroups/document
ationGroup/index
.html. If you write or plan to write an ESA service, then
please let us know
about it. We want to help people write Enhydra Services, so
we can see how
the architecture is working out. If it looks good and
adheres to the the
design philosophy of Enhydra we would be happy to host your
project on
enhydra.org.

Acknowledgements:

The Enhydra development community has used the ESA with an
Enhydra
Multiserver Kernel to integrate code from many other leading
open source
projects such as Tomcat 3.2.1, Xalan and Xerces from Apache;
JOnAS 2.2.7,
Jonathan, and RmiJDBC from ObjectWeb; Castor from ExoLab;
the Concurrent
Utils package from Doug Lea; Merlot from ChannelPoint, and
several W3C
packages (Jigsaw and HTML Tidy). We are grateful to those
organizations for
placing such excellent code into open source.

Wayne Stidolph wayne.stidolph@enhydra.org

Sun, J2EE, JSP, EJB,  JNDI, JDBC, and JTA are trademarks of
Sun
Microsystems, Inc




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