J2EE and OSGi versions of Java PageBox

PageBox

Versions & components

PageBox allows presentation to be distributed everywhere on Internet. It combines the best of traditional alternatives, subsecond response time and lower bandwidth requirement of client/server applications with development and deployment simplicity of Web Applications.

You can browse its documentation here or download it in Word format, PDF format, zipped HTML or in tar-gzipped HTML

This presentation is relatively old now (December 2000). Though this document has been the basis of subsequent documents, we are likely now to implement Web cache interface in a slightly different way. It focus on performance enhancements and corporate needs. Since we broaden the scope of application.

The newer (March 2001) Rationale document refines our objectives and scope.

Our implementation of PageBoxes is named JSPservlet.
You can find information on its implementation in a 3 part article named a "Practical solution for the deployment of JavaServer Pages" on Java Developer Journal.

We definitely recommend reading the article before reading the sources:

Volume 6, issue 1 or Class loader
Volume 6, issue 2 or Servlet support, administration and page caching
Volume 6, issue 5 or Security, sandbox, certificate authorities and revocation lists

We also wrote an introduction.

JSPservlet

The diagram below shows how it works:

Deployment of Web archive in PageBox sandbox

You install JSPservlet on your presentation servers and you store your Web Archives on a Web Server. Then you trigger the deployment of the Web Archives on the presentation servers using an administration servlet of JSPservlet.

Your Web Archives run on the same JVM but they are loaded by independent class loaders and can run in sandboxes. You can see JSPservlet as an applet container for Web Archives. The only difference is JSPservlet updates an archive only when requested by the administrator.

You can browse its documentation and its JavaDoc for more information.

We tested PageBox with Tomcat and Resin. PageBox should be easy to port on other Application Servers. Let us know about your ports. We would be happy to make other versions available on this side. You can download Tomcat from http://jakarta.apache.org/site/binindex.html and Resin from http://www.caucho.com/download/index.xtp.

You also need a Java 2 JDK (J2SE) that can be JDK 1.2.2 to 1.4. You can download it at Sun.

Embedded server version

This version is designed in Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) conformant frameworks. The primary goal of the OSGi service framework is to use the Java (TM) programming language's platform independence and dynamic code-loading capability to make development and dynamic deployment of applications for small-memory devices easier.

You can find documentation on OSGi on http://www.osgi.org.

Sun provides an OSGi implementation named Java Embedded Server 2 (JES 2) on http://www.sun.com/software/embeddedserver/index.html, we used to develop the Embedded version.

We developed this version, not only to allow Web archive deployment on Home Gateway but also because its smaller footprint allows embedding JSPservlet on smaller devices.

You can browse its documentation and its JavaDoc for more information.

Diskless version

Both versions require disk space on JSPservlet host to store cached archives, managed archive list, keystore and policy files, log and statistics.
The diskless version doesn't write on JSPservlet host, to address smaller appliance requirements.

As a consequence:

JSPservlet multicasts to get the archive list at boot time.
It keeps the archives in memory.
It multicasts log messages and statistics

We chose multicast because it allows diskless JSPservlet servers to be served by many archive/statistics/log servers. However we also support multiple unicast UDP for cases where multicast cannot be used.

You can browse its documentation and its JavaDoc for more information.

Publisher

Versions above require either that the archive author also administrates PageBoxes or that the author loads its archive on administrator site and let's know the administrator about where she or he wants to deploy its archive.

Publisher is an automated way to deploy archives.
The archive author downloads a simple Java application, the Publish Client, and uses it to load its archive. The administrator configures the Publish Server to specify where to deploy the archive. You can find its documentation and download it here.

Download version 1.0.4

The compiled classes are provided with the appropriate organization.
You MUST however extract the archives and update the web.xml (Application Server) or the manifest and the property file (JES 2) according to the documentation and to your environment. You can use the Configurator to generate the web.xml.

If you have a problem, send a mail to support@pagebox.net.

Application server version

Sources	.zip	.tar.gz
Product	for Tomcat	for Resin

Documentation
PDF
Word
Html .zip, .tar.gz
JavaDoc .zip, .tar.gz

Embedded server version

Sources	.zip	.tar.gz
Product	for JES 2

Documentation
PDF
Word
Html .zip, .tar.gz
JavaDoc .zip, .tar.gz

Diskless version

Sources	.zip	.tar.gz
Product	for JES 2

Documentation
PDF
Word
Html .zip, .tar.gz
JavaDoc .zip, .tar.gz

Installation Constellations Versions Demo
Publisher Mapper Cocoon/SOAP Security Configurator
J2EE version Embedded version Diskless version