Satish's Weblog

You have probably already heard of all the benefits of moving to GlassFish V2 - the fastest, easy-to-administer, enterprise class, open-source Application Server with clustering support. Here is more reason to cheer - The Migration Tool for Glassfish, like its parent project, is now an open-source project under the Java.net umbrella. The project's new home is https://migrate2glassfish.dev.java.net. A beta version of the tool that supports GlassFish V2 is available for download from – https://migrate2glassfish.dev.java.net/downloads/downl oads.html. The latest release of the tool is a lot slimmer @ just around 6 MB. Future releases of the tool shall be available from this new Java.net site. Earlier versions of the tool that supported GlassFish V1 and Sun Java System Application Server 8.x would continue to be accessible from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/tools/migration.

So what does this mean for you? quicker access to bug fixes and newer releases of the tool, transparent issue management, direct access to developer's through the dev email alias and through forums are just some of the benefits. The biggest benefit, in my opinion, is that this is the best way to develop software – the open source way!!

If you are not already aware, the Migration Tool for GlassFish can help you move your existing Java EE deployment from competing App servers over to GlassFish in three easy steps.

Step 1:

Download the Migration Tool binary from here and unzip the binary to a directory location of your choice.

Step 2:

Setup the following environment variables and launch the tool through the asmigrate script with the '-u' argument.

ASMT_HOME= The directory location where the migration tool binaries are installed

J2EE_HOME= The location of the GlassFish V2 application server.

JAVA_HOME= Java 1.5 install location

Step 3:

Specify the source archive or source code location, the source application server and target directory as illustrated in the image below and click on the 'Migrate' button.

The tool migrates the archive/source code and generates a comprehensive report like the one in the image below:

You could also choose to run the tool in the command line mode. More details are available in the online documentation.

But, be warned – migration may not always be so simple. The quantum of work involved would be directly proportional to the extent of usage of vendor provided proprietary APIs. This should be reason enough to avoid using them in the future.

The migrate2glassfish site also has a host of documentation that can help in your migration efforts. We plan to add more as we go along.

We would love to hear from you. Please mail your queries, suggestions and feedback regrading the tool to – users@migrate2glassfish.dev.java.net. We would also encourage you to share your migration experiences. If you have an existing blog on this subject do point us to it. And finally, in case you want to get involved in this project and contribute do write in to us.

If you are currently using GlassFish V2, do spend a few minutes to register your product to get access to adhoc developer patches and aggregated content like bug fixes, latest news and promotions. Once your application goes live, you might want to seriously consider buying a GlassFish subscription to get access to quality technical support besides a host of other benefits.

If you are thinking of moving your existing enterprise application over to GlassFish, the first Java EE 5 compliant application server, but worried about migration woes, don't fret! There is help on hand by way of Sun's Application Server Migration Tool. This tool allows you to migrate your existing enterprise applications archives (ear's), web archives (war's), resource archives (rar's) and source code from a host of supported application server's over to GlassFish. And, the tool is free to use!

So, what does the tool do?

The tool works on the input archive or source code to translate the runtime deployment descriptors from the source application server format to GlassFish complaint ones. It also parses the JSP and Java source code files (in case of source code input) and provides runtime support for certain custom JSP tags and proprietary API's. It generates ANT based scripts to build the archive in case of source code inputs. In case of archive inputs, it rebundles the migrated archive.

The migration tool can help you migrate to GlassFish from earlier versions of Sun's Application Server and a host of other competitive application servers such as BEA Weblogic - 5.x, 6.x, 8.x, WebSphere – 4.x, 5.x, Jboss 3.x and Apache Tomcat.

How to use the tool?

The tool is available for download as a zip archive. It needs to be downloaded and extracted to a location on your local harddisk. You will need to make sure you have JDK 5 and GlassFish installed on the machine and you should have the JDK_PATH, J2EE_PATH, AS_HOME and ASMT_HOME environmental variables setup correctly. The complete set of installation instructions are available here. The tool can be run in either the UI mode or the command line mode. All you need to do is specify the location of your archive/ source code, the app server for which the source was created, point it to where you want the output to be generated and you are all set. Once the migration is complete, the tool generates a comprehensive report describing what has been migrated, what else needs to be done and errors, if any.

What the tool can't do?

The tool provides limited support for proprietary API's and custom JSP tags. The rest of the unsupported API usages show up in the report and need to be manually corrected before you can deploy your application. Hence, before you start the migration, it would be a good idea to run the Application Verification Kit (AVK) to get an idea of how Java EE compliant your application is. The report from AVK should be able to give you a fairly good idea of how much effort is involved in the migration.

If you need more help with this tool, you can refer to the online documentation.