Startup Deployment Architecture- Running Glassfish V3 Prelude without Apache...

Question

So am I crazy for considering doing a beta/production release on Glassfish V3 Prelude? Since all of my content is dynamic, I'm not even thinking of bothering to set up apache in front either. Doing so complicates the setup by requiring something like AJP or mod_jk and will not offer us much in terms of capability.

So there will be three war files on deployment. 3 JNDI data sources with about 90 connections parked, scaling up to 160 to a PGSQL datastore....

The three wars comprise a CMS system and a grails application?

Is my logic fatally flawed that I don't need to put apache in front of this setup?

Answer 1

I have a Grails app in test running on GlassFish V2 and I haven't found any compelling reason to frontend with Apache. Somewhere I read (wish I could remember where and cite the source) that with Tomcat's performance improvements there was less and less of a reason to use Apache with Tomcat. The gist of it was the added performance came with just enough added complexity that it may not be worth it.

Is there a specific feature that is pushing you to V3 Prelude?

Answer 2

The biggest bonus of using Apache in front of GlassFish/Tomcat/Resin/Jetty/whatever is the versatility it grants you. Tomcat can replace Apache for instance, and that works out relatively well. However, that means everything needs to be served from that one Tomcat container, which is throwing a lot of extra processing that the instance has to do that wouldn't be necessary with Apache in the picture. Adding a simple PHP based forum to your infrastructure suddly becomes a bit of a hassle, rather than a 5 minute task thanks to Apache. Another benefit of putting Apache in front is it allows you the ability to take the load of serving static content away from your container. That's my biggest beef with having a container serve by itself, without an JK/AJP proxies involved. Your system becomes a bit more complex, and a bit less versatile. In the end though, if it increases performance, maybe it's worth it.