eWave Studio and ServletExec @ JDJ

Over the past year all the major database vendors and many of the classic client/server tools vendors have turned their attention to the application server market. The venerable database and tools vendor, Unify, is no exception. Unify has released a new version of its eWave Studio and eWave application servers into the fray. It considers itself an endorser of the J2EE platform, but is not yet an official licensee of the J2EE. I recently looked at this latest release with an eye on its Servlets and JSP capabilities.

Unify's Application Server Products
Unify offers four different products in their application server family: Unify eWave Studio, eWave ServletExec, eWave Commerce and eWave Engine. The eWave ServletExec product was obtained by Unify in its acquisition of New Atlanta Communications LLC in April of this year. eWave Studio and eWave ServletExec are designed for creating Servlets and JavaServer Pages applications. The eWave Engine and Commerce products are oriented toward the creation of EJB applications. Unify offers the eWave ServletExec as a separate product. In addition, it's bundled into the EJB application server, eWave Engine. Since the two server engines can be evaluated separately at this point, you can work with whichever engine best suits your purpose. If you're primarily interested in building Servlet and JSP applications, then eWave Studio and eWave ServletExec are all you need. Conversely, if you're looking to build EJB-based applications or applications that combine EJB technology with Servlets and JSPs, then eWave Engine is probably the better choice.

Installing and Configuring eWave Products
Both the eWave Engine and Studio can be downloaded as two installation kits with a combined size of over 120MB. This makes them unwieldy to download without a high-speed Internet connection.

eWave ServletExec comes in two flavors:

1. The "in-process" version works directly with a variety of popular Web servers (but not Apache).
2. The "out-of-process" version supports Apache and provides some additional flexibility for stopping and starting the server exclusive of the Web server, and for plugging in alternative JVMs. (The ServletExec downloads are just over 2MB in size and much quicker to download.)

To download a trial version of any Unify product you'll need a license key that unlocks the software for the duration of the trial period. Unify sends the license keys for each product via e-mail. Unify has packaged a lot of technology into its various servers, and each one has enough features to be a complete topic in its own right. I chose to focus my attention on the eWave Studio and eWave ServletExec combination for several reasons.

First, while Unify's eWave engine is positioned to compete with the larger enterprise players such as iPlanet, IBM, BEA and Oracle, Unify has not yet licensed the J2EE. Second, Servlets and JSPs are hot commodities at the moment, and customers are more likely to consider Servlet/JSP engines from vendors that have not yet fully committed to the J2EE. Furthermore, I liked the concept of the eWave Studio product and was excited about the chance to get my hands on it. After downloading the two product kits, I managed to get them installed after some initial fumbling. (I started off using the JDK 1.3 release, which caused some problems with Unify.) eWave Studio installs relatively quickly, but the ServletExec engine comes equipped with a lengthy installation and configuration guide. Integrating the engine with IIS, iPlanet WebServer or Apache is not a simple drag-and-drop process, but it's not rocket science either. As usual, I attempted to get everything installed without carefully reading through the directions. After running into the JDK 1.3 problem, I hopped onto the Unify news server and got all my configuration questions answered by scanning through some existing posts. All in all the installation went quite smoothly.