Java Products BUT PHP based website ?
I am starting to run a website which features java and j2ee products. That site would be more of ecosystem containing forums, blogs, demos for webapps etc. I am java developer, good in web development using j2ee technologies in JSP, JScripts, HTML. Ofcourse if I want to build a website, first thing I think is JSP and which container. (Container is pretty much standard, Tomcat for webapps). Hence quest for nice CMS application or portal application begins. So instead of researching and spending time what container and framework would be fine, I decide to look at major java sites infrastructure. I was pretty sure, for starters like me, it’s easier to replicate their website technologies than build myself. So here what I find.
- http://www.springframework.org – Running in drupal (PHP based content management site)
- I recently read blog about “Java Parallel Processing Framework”. When I visited their site, again it was PHP.
- And many many others.
It has definitely ticked me off, what’s so wrong with j2ee technologies, to run a even simple website. Everyone knows that JSP is far superior technology than PHP. So why j2ee evangelist, who live, eat, blog, earn using jsp, BUT not build their product site using JSP? For simple static site, just HTML is good. No doubt about it. But we try to wrap it up with some dynamic UI page, just in case. Ok so lets wrap that HTML page in JSP. but why PHP? Number of reasons, I think, might be?
- There is no simple content management system (CMS) in JSP world
- There are not enough JSP/Tomcat hosting available.
- We are using 3rd party hosting team, which prefers to use PHP
- There are many tools available in PHP, hence running whole website makes more sense.
Lets try to dissect each one by one.
There is no simple content management system in JSP world Yes there are.
- OpenEdit
- dotCMS
- LifeRay
- Clearspace
Most of them are available as FREE and almost all are free to open source projects. This also brings us to interesting point, do we really need CMS application, for my website? In most of cases, I don’t think. If you are only person to change content and you change content lets say every week, then it is lighter to run simple JSP pages. How many times, you update documentation of product? (Please be not confused with need to source control. I personally prefer everything should be in source control)
There are not enough JSP/Tomcat hosting available.
Over the period of time, with reduce cost of hardware processing and RAM, many good hosting companies are providing tomcat and even jboss hosting. I don’t this as show stopper now, if you want to host site running on tomcat. Here is list of companies, I researched 2 years back. Of course over the period, ,more companies has added.. and their plan prices has dropped.
- http://www.eapps.com/ManagedHosting/TomcatJSP.jsp
- http://rimuhosting.com/javahosting.jsp
- http://www.hostjava.net
- http://www.DailyRazor.com
- http://www.lunarpages.com
- http://www.javaservlethosting.com/index.php
- http://www.oxxus.net/java-hosting/features.htm
- http://neospire.net/products.services/j2ee.application.hosting/tomcat.php
- http://www.westhost.com/jsp-hosting.html
- http://www.smedia.info/hosting-j2ee-jsp.asp
- https://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/jsp-servlet-hosting/
- http://www.capital-internet.net/hosting_shared.jsp
- http://www.hub.org/hosting.php
- http://www.kattare.com/java-servlet-hosting.kvws
- http://www.metawerx.net/
- http://www.mmaweb.net
- http://www.visionwebhosting.net/index.html
- http://jsp-servlet.net/Gold.jsp
- http://www.jwebhosting.net/service.jsp
- https://www.visionwebhosting.net/services.html
- http://www.blacksun.ca/hosting.html
- http://www.echomountain.com/ApplicationInfrastructures.html
- http://www.svwh.net/dedicated_hosting.php
- http://www.kgbinternet.com/index.jsp
We are using 3rd party hosting team, which prefers to use PHP
Well, you spending time coding on Tomcat or any other server, how big is deal for you to code JSP or convert html to JSP and throw it in Tomcat. If you are open source project, then you got volunteers. If you are commercial product provider, it makes more sense to use j2ee platform. To me, it puts bad impression if you using PHP and selling j2ee based CMS product. 🙂 To me, springframework is getting more interesting, but it’s running on Drupal? Their MVC or webflow APIs are not mature enough for this simple site?
There are many tools available in PHP, hence running whole website makes more sense.
This is one of most important factor, which deciding between JSP and PHP based hosting. I did some research, I found tools which are not great as PHP counterpart, but they solve the purpose. For Forums
- jforum.net
- javabb.org
- http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/jive-forums
For wikis
- xwiki.org
- JSPWiki
- SnipSnap
For Blogs
- Apache Roller
- Peeble
Issue Tracking
- JIRA
- TrackPlus (I just read their announcement on theserverside.com)
Continous Integration Tools
- Cruise Control
- Continuum
- Luntbuild
- Hudson
Wishlist:
Most common wish is, ‘Single Sign On (SSO)’ for all tools. If it is public website, then I want users to log on once for forums and able to comment to blogs using same profile. Right now, every product is using some kind of security, like j2ee form based security or Spring security or home grown security code. They also document, how to do SSO capabilities, but at this point, it seems more of hassle. Anyways, in case of PHP, I don’t think, people think about luxuries like SSO. Above wish, mentioned ‘user profile’. I am not able to find mature product, whose whole purpose is to manage user profile. Thinking aloud, brings us to point, user profile is essentailly feature of CMS application. So if I need user profile kinda feature on my public site, I can use CMS application. But can we use same user profile application to manage profiles to all other modules like forums or blog or customer service?
Should we always use J2EE for hosting if we are in business of J2EE/Java?
Now, I try to look at whole website hosting task at 35,000 feet. Basically, you want to spend minimal resources to get maximum UI experience. So if using vBulletin or phpBB makes my life easier then why I should stick to idealism of using j2ee? I can try to answer this by using these criteria
Now, I try to look at whole website hosting task at 35,000 feet. Basically, you want to spend minimal resources to get maximum UI experience. So if using vBulletin or phpBB makes my life easier then why I should stick to idealism of using j2ee? I can try to answer this by using these criteria
Q: I am selling/open sourcing j2ee product which is related to web-app development?
A: You should use JSP based hosting. It definitely puts good impression. Even better use your product in that webapp if possible.
Q: I am open source evangelist for java and j2ee but I still want PHP site?
A: Again, you should use JSP. If you can code in PHP, then you can code same functionality in JSP (assuming you are JSP developer)
Q: I need to use a tool which is perfect in PHP or Python (example Trac or vBulletin)
A: In this situation, using tool like Trac or anything else, shouldn’t matter. Basically, productivity matters. I would suggest to use hybrid solution. (Ofcourse SSO is nearly impossible)
References:
- http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-2006/jw-1101-ci.html
- http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2007/jw-03-bugs.html?page=2
- http://java.dzone.com/news/open-source-web-applications-p
- http://java.dzone.com/news/open-source-web-applications-p-0
- http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/building_a_website_with_an
Note:
I just read few more user comments. Almost every other user is recommending Drupal for CMS/Portal website. I wish, if something like that comes up in JSP world. If that is made on Spring, it’s even better.
I just read few more user comments. Almost every other user is recommending Drupal for CMS/Portal website. I wish, if something like that comes up in JSP world. If that is made on Spring, it’s even better.
Categories: Java, java based CMS
Java, java based CMS
Ashish Jain Blog 
I am a JSP developer who host my website using PHP. For hosting in PHP I need to pay only 1/10 of JSP hosting. Even though its difficult for me to make some changes in my website or add a new plugin to the CMS, I am still hosting on PHP. I don’t think in the recent future I will be able to move JSP hosting.
If you are using JAVA, you will need Java VM. Each VM need its on RAM.So its not cost effective to run JVM for each users. It would be cheaper to host in PHP as it does not require its own VM.-aahttp://www.indiabolbol.com
There was an interesting discussion about this on TSS: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49064IMO, I see no point in forcing a peg into a round hole – if I have a site, which isn’t too complex then why not do it in PHP? That’s exactly what it’s designed for. I could do it in JSP, or Faces or whatever, but PHP def. has the capabilities to do the ‘large scale stuff’ as well. In terms of eating your own dogfood, then, yes, if you make software that’s designed to fit in the ‘web-tier’ its prob a good idea to use it :), but I thought Spring’s response made good sense: that they were about improving the product not spending time on creating websites with it. Interestingly, the new spring source site is Liferay backed: http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/about_us/news/springsource@aa – there’s no need to have a sep. JVM for each user – you can partition apps quite nicely using the J2EE platform: it’s what I’ve been doing for my users for years.
OpenEdit looks to be the one CMS in your list that actually is targeted as a replacement to Drupal and Joomla but Drupal looks like it has a lot more small- to mid-size business friendly features over OpenEdit. Liferay, Clearspace, and the Alfresco CMS seem to be targeted as replacements to commercial vendor portal and enterprise content management systems like Vignette, which probably would not lend itself to being hosted easily or cheaply on a ‘shared hosting’ provider’s servers. dotCMS seems to be rather heavy-weight, too.Interestingly, OpenEdit’s default macro language is Velocity-based, which seems to be much better suited to creating dynamically generated HTML pages that “look” and “act” like static HTML pages. I would be interested in finding out what functionality one might have to give up in switching to JSP from Velocity with OpenEdit, (because I know nothing about it other than what I read on their site today about it)
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If you are using JAVA, you will need Java VM. Each VM need its on RAM.So its not cost effective to run JVM for each users. It would be cheaper to host in PHP as it does not require its own VM.-aahttp://www.indiabolbol.com
OpenEdit looks to be the one CMS in your list that actually is targeted as a replacement to Drupal and Joomla but Drupal looks like it has a lot more small- to mid-size business friendly features over OpenEdit. Liferay, Clearspace, and the Alfresco CMS seem to be targeted as replacements to commercial vendor portal and enterprise content management systems like Vignette, which probably would not lend itself to being hosted easily or cheaply on a 'shared hosting' provider's servers. dotCMS seems to be rather heavy-weight, too.Interestingly, OpenEdit's default macro language is Velocity-based, which seems to be much better suited to creating dynamically generated HTML pages that "look" and "act" like static HTML pages. I would be interested in finding out what functionality one might have to give up in switching to JSP from Velocity with OpenEdit, (because I know nothing about it other than what I read on their site today about it)
There was an interesting discussion about this on TSS: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49064IMO, I see no point in forcing a peg into a round hole – if I have a site, which isn't too complex then why not do it in PHP? That's exactly what it's designed for. I could do it in JSP, or Faces or whatever, but PHP def. has the capabilities to do the 'large scale stuff' as well. In terms of eating your own dogfood, then, yes, if you make software that's designed to fit in the 'web-tier' its prob a good idea to use it :), but I thought Spring's response made good sense: that they were about improving the product not spending time on creating websites with it. Interestingly, the new spring source site is Liferay backed: http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/about_us/news/springsource@aa – there's no need to have a sep. JVM for each user – you can partition apps quite nicely using the J2EE platform: it's what I've been doing for my users for years.
I am a JSP developer who host my website using PHP. For hosting in PHP I need to pay only 1/10 of JSP hosting. Even though its difficult for me to make some changes in my website or add a new plugin to the CMS, I am still hosting on PHP. I don't think in the recent future I will be able to move JSP hosting.
You are such a genius guy! Anyway, Java hosting is no more expensive. Check http://www.jvmhost.com – I could not find better deal these days
I agree with JVM Host. I don't believe you will find better offer than http://www.jvmhost.com when it comes to Java hosting
JVM has the greatest share in the market according to my friend. Anyways, I appreciate them a lot.
But I thought Spring's response made good sense: that they were about improving the product not spending time on creating websites with it. Interestingly, the new spring source site is Liferay backed
I can offer my opinion here. I was a Java developer, and on my spare time I wrote a Tomcat/JSP app for my online editing business. Got to say looking back I wish I had used PhP. Why? Can't say it was easier to write it in JSP, and the cost of hosting Java apps are so much higher due to their resource intensive nature.
As much as I am as a Java devotee, I can't say JSP is the best for web development. Slower and more costly to develop than PhP that's for sure.
Yes guys! I think majority of us would agree with JVM?..
Albin I think is right.Triactol
Now I have just got a great list of choices. Thanks by the way for the great help!
Nothing wrong with presenting your Java offer site in php. Aside from this the languages can be mixed using php-java bridge. There is an article on this at http://www.jvmhost.com/articles
Prices changed since 2009. For PHP/Java hosting check http://www.jvmhost.com where I got nice support and unbeatable offer.
i think JVM is addict. Empower Network
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