What the benefit of this tool??

[MarkusRichter]

Hello,

I have downloaded + installed the J2EE Migaration Kit successfully. I want to migrate a deployable EAR file from WebLogic to SAP NetWeaver. However, I was very disappointed when I looked into this tool!! I was hoping that this tool would migrate my EAR file automatically to SAP NetWeaver. However, the tool is not able to to take an EAR file as an input file and does whatever is necessary to migrate it to SAP NetWeaver... At least that is what I expect from a migration tool!

I doubt that this tool has any benefit in real projects!!!

Kind Regards,

Markus

[MarkusRichter]

Hello,

yes, your are right about the different vendor specific deployment descriptors. However, if you provide a "Migration Kit" for different Application Servers, such as BEA WebLogic then you have everything you need to know in order to automatically convert an EJB JAR file to SAP WebAS! There is specification about what WebLogic needs for an EJB. The same is given for SAP WebAS. From this knowledge you can map the different behavior. Not supported features can be listed up and inform the user about this..

I admit that this would be quite a challenge to provide such a tool, because you have to consider many details. But this would be a true "Migration Kit" which has a real benefit. Everything else is more or less just a nice "try"!

O.k. I might be too hypercritical. But I am working with J2EE for many years and I am sick and tired of all the promotion and afterwards the tools do not keep there promises!

Never mind...

Markus

[Former Member]

Hi Markus,

I don't think that you're hypercritical. I absolutely agree with you regarding the benefit issue.

I've also tried to migrate our applications (that are running fine on JBoss, IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic) without having spec compatibility breaks or even changes to the code base in mind. If you don't use some vendor specific features - and we don't do that -, it should be always possible to migrate an application by simply creating appropriate deployment descriptors and configuration stuff (datasources, JMS topics and so on) for the new AS. THAT should be the benefit of such a tool.

If I first have to create a whole eclipse workspace for the application to get the dd generation running it is not really useful for me. I think, it's a step into the right direction but the SAP team has still some work to do on it.

BTW, IBM's RAD does it as you would expect it!

Regards

--thomas

[Former Member]

Hi Thomas,

I think you are right we were able to get a single EAR that was running successfully in WebSphere, JBoss and SAP WebAS.

We will need to to have web-j2ee-engine.xml, application-j2ee-engine.xml and datasource.xml which are referred to in SAP WebAS. you would have added xml file specific to JBoss as well. you can add the above xml's and have you EAR run in all three application servers.

Regards,

S.Divakar

[Former Member]

Dear Markus,

by the first reading of your posting, i was realy a bit confused. But this was just only the first impression

Yeah, then i read the J2EE specification documents and all the things which come out of the Java and J2EE vendors and community, i would assume that i have only to modify some deployment descripton files in the EAR and everything runs fine. But this was sadly not the reality.

First, the J2EE specification, and in particular the EJB 2.0 specification, is ambiguous in some points. This yields in different interpretations and implementations by the J2EE vendors. One example are the ejbCreate() methods and their signatures.

Second, most of the J2EE vendors have added many extensions to their products like primary key generators or extensions to EJB-QL (JBossQL for example).

In both cases you have to modify your code and rebuild your EAR to get a runable application.

The J2EE MiKi provides you with the needed tools to do this task:

You have plugins to import the source code into your developer studio; these generate the deployment descriptor files for the WebAS. And you have documents which assist you to pay attention on many aspects of your migration.

Bye

Halil