JBoss

JBoss is a popular open source application server based on JEE technology. Being JEE based, the JBoss supports cross-platform java applications. It was embedded with Apache Tomcat web server. It runs under any JVM of 1.3 or later versions. JBoss supports JNDI, Servlet/JSP (Tomcat or Jetty), EJB, JTS/JTA, JCA, JMS, Clustering (JavaGroups), Web Services (Axis), and IIOP integration (JacORB).

JBoss JBPM is a workflow and BPM engine. Enabling the creation of business processes that coordinates between people, applications and services is the functionality of BPM engine. The combination of workflow applications development with process design is a feature of JBoss jBPM. The business process is graphically represented to facilitate a strong link between the business analyst and technical developer. This feature is provided by the JBoss jBPM process designer.

Different components of the application are to be measured. This step is to find where the degradation is, whether it is external or internal and where is the appliciation spending all the time. Using Joss JMX agents and monitoring the deployed components to the application server involves in the first step.

After finding the most of the time spent by specific components or libraries or most of the resources, one can use Jprobe a specialized tool for examining the single object or the objects loaded in the memory.

JBoss cache is a product. Frequently accessed Java objects are cached by utilzing JBoss cache to improve the performance of e-business applications. JBoss decreases the network traffic and increases the scalability of applications by eliminating unnecessary database acces.Fully transactional features and highly configurable set of options which are to deal with concurrent data access, are provided by JBoss cache in an efficient manner possible for the applications.

The JGroups framework provides services to enable peer-to-peer communications between nodes in a cluster. It is built on top a stack of network communication protocols that provide transport, discovery, reliability and failure detection, and cluster membership management services.

You could activate the "Commit Option A" that is the container caches entity bean state between transactions. This option assumesthat the container has exclusive access to the persistentstore and therefore it doesn’t need to synchronizethe in-memory bean state from the persistent store at the beginning of each transaction.

Built on the standards JavaServer Faces and EJB 3.0, JBoss Seam unifies component and programming models and delivers a consistent and powerful framework for rapid creation of web applications with Java EE 5.0. Seam simplifies web application development and enables new functionality that was difficult to implement by hand before, such as stateful conversations, multi-window operation, and handling concurrent fine-grained AJAX requests. Seam also unifies and integrates popular open source technologies like Facelets, Hibernate, iText, and Lucene.

Seam runs beautifully on other application servers - just like everything else the Hibernate team does, this is not a JBoss-only thing.

It is technically possible to put a JBoss server instance into multiple clusters at the same time, this practice is generally not recommended, as it increases the management complexity.

Basically starting JBoss with the “all” configuration contains everything needed for clustering:

It has all the libraries for clustering:

► JGroups.jar, jboss-cache.jar

► Clustered beans (cluster-service.xml)

► HA-JNDI

► HTTP session replications (tc5-cluster-service.xml)

► Farming

► HA-JMS

A local-tx-datasource identifies a data source that uses transactions, even distributed trans actions within the local application server, but doesn’t use distributed transactions among multiple application servers. An xa-datasource on the other hand identifies a data source that uses distributed transaction among multi-ple application servers.

In my opinion BPEL and BPM are quite different things so they cannot even be compared. The problems boils down to the fact that these years maybe BPEL has been marketed for something which isn't: that is a Business Process Management framework.

BPEL is made up for service orchestration, that is publishing new services as a function of other services.

while BPM si needed for handling human task management functionalities and subprocess management.

Seam only works on JDK 5.0 and above. It uses annotations and other JDK 5.0 features.

JBossTS supports Web Services transactions, including extended transaction models designed specifically for loosely-coupled, long running business processes. J2EE transactions can integrate seamlessly with Web Services transactions using our integrated, bi-directional transaction bridge. Interoperability with many other vendors is provided out-of-the-box and JBoss is an active participant in these standards.

JBoss registers in the JNDI tree a JTA UserTransaction Object which can be user to manage a distributed transaction.

Yes: that is many threads can access it cuncurrentely and request for sessions. It holds cached data that has been read in one unit of work and may be reused in a future unit of work. Good practice is to create it when the application is initialized.

The Session interface wraps a JDBC Connection. This interface is a single threaded object which represents a single unit of work with application and persistent database. It's retrieved by the SessionFactory's openSession() method