I've jumped on the JavaEE 6 bandwagon, with one application already in production. The developer productivity improvements in JavaEE6/Glassfish V3 are tremendous. The only downside is that I still have some JavaEE 5 applications in production. The JavaEE 5 apps can't migrate to JavaEE 6 until Icefaces supports JSF 1.2.
One workaround to this is to bundle the JSF 1.2 implementation with your application, then configure the classloader using the sun-web.xml file to load this bundled JSF library instead of the container's JSF 2.0 library. This however only works with a standalone WAR file; when the WAR is bundled in an EAR, and references other EJB-JAR's, this trick isn't possible. Yet I still wanted to move new application development to JavaEE 6.
My solution was to run both Glassfish V2 and Glassfish V3 on the same box, with mod_jk forwarding requests to the appropriate container. In this way I am able to keep my existing JavaEE 5 / Icefaces applications running, and deploy new applications to the JavaEE 6 environment.
The first step was to get GF v2, and GF v3 running on the same machine. I have GF v2 running on the standard ports, and I incremented each port by 1 for GF v3. It looks like:
| GF v2 Port | GF v3 Port | |
| HTTP | 8080 | 8081 |
| HTTPS | 8181 | 8182 |
| HTTP - ADMIN | 4848 | 4849 |
| IIOP | 3700 | 3701 |
| IIOP SSL | 3820 | 3821 |
| IIOP SSL-MUTUALAUTH | 3920 | 3921 |
| JMX | 8686 | 8687 |
| JMS | 7676 | 7677 |
Next, we had to get mod_jk installed and working. The glassfish support team (yes, I pay for support!) pointed me to the following resources:
- V2 instructions - http://weblogs.java.net/blog/2006/03/17/running-glassfish-apache-httpd
- V3 instructions - http://weblogs.java.net/blog/2009/06/24/running-glassfish-v3-apache-httpd
These were a great starting point, from which I ended up with the solution.
mod_jk.conf:
#mod_jk/1.2.28 LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk.so JkWorkersFile /etc/httpd/conf.d/worker.properties # Where to put jk logs JkLogFile /var/log/httpd/mod_jk.log # Set the jk log level [debug/error/info] JkLogLevel info # Select the log format JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y] " # JkOptions indicate to send SSL KEY SIZE, JkOptions +ForwardKeySize +ForwardURICompat -ForwardDirectories +DisableReuse # JkRequestLogFormat set the request format JkRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T" # Should mod_jk send SSL information (default is On) JkExtractSSL On # What is the indicator for SSL (default is HTTPS) JkHTTPSIndicator HTTPS # What is the indicator for SSL session (default is SSL_SESSION_ID) JkSESSIONIndicator SSL_SESSION_ID # What is the indicator for client SSL cipher suit (default is SSL_CIPHER) JkCIPHERIndicator SSL_CIPHER # What is the indicator for the client SSL certificated? (default is SSL_CLIENT_CERT) JkCERTSIndicator SSL_CLIENT_CERT # Set the following if you want all vhosts to inherhit JkMounts from global JkMountCopy All # Send requests to GlassFish JkMount /javaee6app* worker1 JkMount /javaee6app/* worker1 JkMount /javaee6app* worker2 JkMount /javaee6app/* worker2 # Send all glassfish-test requests to GlassFish JkMount /glassfish-test/* worker1 JkShmFile /var/log/httpd/jk-runtime-status
And worker.properties:
## Define 1 real worker using ajp13 worker.list=worker1,worker2 # Set properties for worker1 (ajp13) worker.worker1.type=ajp13 worker.worker1.host=localhost.localdomain worker.worker1.port=8009 #Only used for a member worker of a load balancer. #worker.worker1.lbfactor=50 #Do not use cachesize with values higher then 1 on Apache 2.x prefork #worker.worker1.cachesize=10 #connection_pool_size replace cachesize as of v1.2.16 worker.worker1.connection_pool_size=1 worker.worker1.connection_pool_timeout=0 worker.worker1.socket_keepalive=1 #Socket timeout in seconds worker.worker1.socket_timeout=60 worker.worker2.type=ajp13 worker.worker2.host=localhost.localdomain worker.worker2.port=8010 #Only used for a member worker of a load balancer. #worker.worker2.lbfactor=50 #Do not use cachesize with values higher then 1 on Apache 2.x prefork #worker.worker2.cachesize=10 #connection_pool_size replace cachesize as of v1.2.16 worker.worker2.connection_pool_size=1 worker.worker2.connection_pool_timeout=0 worker.worker2.socket_keepalive=1 #Socket timeout in seconds worker.worker2.socket_timeout=60
These are not the worker.properties as prescribed in the above links. After implementing the initial solution, I got reports from the wild of users mysteriously losing sessions. After much reading about mod_jk, I think I narrowed down the problem to a cachesize/connection_pool_size > 1 in conjunction with the prefork mpm apache module. Apparently this is a no-no.
So with these settings in place, I am able to develop new apps in JavaEE 6, while still running my older JavaEE 5 apps, on the same box. Looking forward to Icefaces 2.0 though, so I can drop this needless complexity!
