installing glassfish on ubuntu karmic using synaptics package manager

Question

I'm trying to learn to use glassfish for the first time. My IDE is netbeans and I've installed the glassfish plugin for netbeans. I opened up synaptics package manager and typed in glassfish. My choices were

imqv2

glassfish-activaton

glassfish-mail

glassfish-appserv

glassfish-toplink-essentials

glassfish-jmac-api

glassfish-javaee

I'm not sure what is in each package, or which package are needed. I can't seem to find anything that tells me anything descriptive about these packages.

I've seen a lot of tutorials on how to install glassfish, but I'd prefer to use apt-get / synaptics to install glassfish so that syntactics can take care of updating.

Answer 1

To strictly answer your question, I think that a typical install would at least include glassfish-appserv, glassfish-javaee, glassfish-toplink-essentials (for JPA).

But for development, I'd warmly recommend to use GlassFish v3 (because of the session preservation across deployments feature, to maximize productivity) and to install it manually in your home directory. Download the self-extracting installer file from here.

Answer 2

Do you want to run the latest and greatest software? It looks like Synaptic has Glassfish version 2 which is an entire major version out of date.

Just for the record: I love Ubuntu and their (well, Debian's) package management system. However, for any Java applications, I prefer to do manual installations. So, my Maven, Eclipse, Tomcat, Glassfish, etc. were all done through manual installs for the newest version... and because sudo apt-get install winds up throwing the app in some weird place and can have unexpected behavior.

Here is how you can do a manual install...

1. Download Glassfish: wget http://download.java.net/glassfish/v3/nightly/latest-glassfish.zip
2. Extract the archive anywhere on your filesystem
3. Inside your IDE such as Netbeans or Eclipse, setup a new server and point it at where you extracted the file
4. It's also useful to add a new environment variable to ~/.bashrc file, which will make it easier to start the server from the command-line, e.g. $GLASSFISH_HOME/bin/asadmin start-domain domain1

Another cool thing to try, if you're into maven, is to use the maven-embedded-glassfish-plugin. It's a clean way to get a web app up and running and not need to manually install glassfish and not even have to use an IDE.

You might also try asking this question at superuser.com if you really want to get it working with Synaptic.