10.6. JSR-88 Configuration & Deployment Tools

The J2EE Deployment API (JSR-88) provides a standard API for tools to use when interacting with J2EE application servers. This lets a single tool connect to any compliant server product.

The API includes two aspects; application configuration, and application deployment. The configuration aspects involve creating J2EE deployment descriptors, and a server-specific deployment plan. A tool can build a GUI to walk the user through the process of configuring an application to run in Geronimo, or any other server environment. The deployment aspects cover the same features provided by the Geronimo deploy tool: deploy applications, starting, stopping, undeploying, etc. In fact, the Geronimo deploy tool uses the J2EE Deployment API, which is how it's able to deploy to different servers (you need only specify the server product's JSR-88 driver).

Geronimo will ultimately support both configuration and deployment aspects of the J2EE Deployment API. However, as of version 1.0, the configuration support is quite limited (outbound connectors are well supported, but inbound connectors and other modules types are not yet). The deployment features work well, for both the same machine and remote machines.

10.6.1. Connecting a Tool to Geronimo

In order to connect an arbitrary configuration and deployment tool (such as a compliant IDE) to Geronimo, you must typically point the tool at the Geronimo driver for JSR-88, and then specify a URI, username, and password to connect. (This process is much like connecting to a database using JDBC.) The connection settings you'll need are:

Table 10.4. Geronimo J2EE Deployment API Connection Settings

ParameterValue
JSR-88 Driverrepository/geronimo/jars/geronimo-deploy-jsr88-1.0.jar (note that a number of other Geronimo libraries must also be on the ClassPath -- this will be improved in a future release)
Connection URIdeployer:geronimo:jmx://host:port
Username & PasswordMust be a valid user in the admin group as defined in the default security realm (generally controlled by the entries in var/security/users.properties and var/security/groups.properties). The installation default is the username "system" with password "manager".

A future release will support a single relocatable driver JAR, but for now, the deployment JAR requires many Geronimo libraries.