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Will Cloud Computing Solve the Bad Relationship Between Java and ISPs?

Submitted by gcollin on Thu, 2009/05/21 - 6:16am
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Both the Java language and JEE have always been far behind PHP when it comes to hosting services and ISPs. For example, in France, Free and SFR Neuf offer up to 1Gb hard drive and a MySql database for everyone to create their websites in PHP. For 60€ / year, you can easily have a professional shared server with the LAMP stack installed.

If you're looking for Java Tomcat hosting, you'll have to triple the price (http://www.hebergement-java.fr is one of the cheapest), with only JSPs and the trusty old Tomcat 5.5. I know a server for Java needs more memory and more CPU than in PHP, that explains the price increase.

But as it is really easy and cheap (free!) to have a PHP-powered website with a hosting company, more and more people developed web applications in PHP, then frameworks, then extremely powerful and complete tools (let me think: WordPress , Drupal , Joomla) that allow more people, even without development knowledge, to create and maintains their own websites.

For all this reasons my website ,which describes a new Java web development tool and concept, is using PHP! I'm sure you will all find great Java tools that do the same (I see Zimbra and Lutece), but how much money do you need to host them?

Now, with Cloud Computing and especially Google Application Engine, CPU and memory consumption are less of a problem, as all of the available servers are executing the applications. For example, an application may need great CPU power, but not all the time! The available servers are much better used by Cloud Computing.

Thanks to Google, you can develop and host your Java application for free ! I hope Google App. Engine will see a lot of Java applications, that other hosting services will offer compatible (or even better, complete JEE) hosting, that will in turn improve the number of Java applications, frameworks and finally powerful tools in Java.

 

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Comments

David Lee replied on Thu, 2009/05/21 - 9:42am

No.  The response to Google's App Engine was split at best.  The Google's app engine is possible because they were willing to spend the time and resources on modifying an app server in such a way to make it possible to do java web hosting on a massive scale.   This googlized version of Jetty is not available for anyone else to use, and since no one else dealt with this problem (not even Sun) before Google and Google's service is free in many cases, why would anyone else enter this space ?   Free has made it pretty unattractive for anyone wishing to compete w/Google in cloud/java hosting space.

 

 

OtengiM replied on Thu, 2009/05/21 - 11:24am

Get a VPS and to manage Java for the web with it is very easy. Share Hosting is old and even for PHP it is getting old because now PHP people use Zend framework and other frameworks.

 So the thing is getting very similar to PHP as Java. I suggest get a VPS and you are in your way to deploy great Java web apps.

gcollin replied on Thu, 2009/05/21 - 11:44am

 

If I take a look at this:

http://code.google.com/intl/fr/appengine/docs/

I see that google app engine respect servlet and JPA standards. Anything you need to create great apps... These applications could easily be run on other JEE standard hosting services.

What I meant with this post is that if cloud computing generalize, Java support would be much cheaper, and we'll see more of it.

I know it's easy to get a VPS and manage it, thing is, it cost too much.

 

gcollin replied on Thu, 2009/05/21 - 11:45am in response to: sybrix

We can see PHP free hosting and hosting with a fee competing, why it would be different for Java ?

Bora Ertung replied on Fri, 2009/05/22 - 8:03am in response to: OtengiM

I agree on VPS option. There are countless VPS options out there with root access. I do not see what this cloud computing services would serve. Free scalibility is a good thing but I do not like the idea of sharing company related data with a third party service provider especially if they have huge data mining capabilities.

David Lee replied on Fri, 2009/05/22 - 9:17am in response to: gcollin

You're not taking into account how old this problem is and the fact that no one but google has successfully dealt with it.  Java will be more acceptable to ISPs when one JVM can be shared among many users and when this setup is as cost effective as its PHP alternative.  Current servlet containers make this impossible.  It'll take a new kind of app server. The cloud is not the answer.

gcollin replied on Fri, 2009/05/22 - 3:17pm in response to: sybrix

Yes you're right. JVM sharing would be better.

But until it comes, should he ever happen, we can do Tomcat or JBoss sharing no ? What's preventing ISPs from doing this ?

David Lee replied on Fri, 2009/05/22 - 8:48pm in response to: gcollin

This is the answer.

http://code.google.com/p/groovy-lamp/

 

This is not my project, but I am working on similar project that will be on google code very shortly.  The difference between the project above and what I'm working on is I started with hosting in mind. Also, the project above seems to be a proof of concept, and I've taken this much further. 

No current app server is well suited for shared hosting. again, google runs a modified version of jetty.

The other problem is threads.  Ideally a mvm would be able kill an individual application and/or individual threads.  Resource utilization would be available the os so that out of control processes could be managed automatically.

There are other projects that almost achieve what an MVM would. Xito is one such project, but it's more of a desktop launcher, but everything is there to achieve 1 jvm running many apps.

 

This whole hosting problem was very well analyzed and discussed in this post(just in case you missed it)

http://java.dzone.com/news/hosting-java-web-applications-

 

 

Grard COLLIN replied on Sat, 2009/05/23 - 7:57am

In fact, what's preventing us from doing a shareable application server dedicated to ISP ?

One allowing fine management of each web application (without seing others) and that ensure resources are not all taken by one application ?

We can take an open source server, like tomcat or Jetty or apache or glassfish, and provide the necessary changes.

I think that would be a great thing for Java. No ?

Walter Bogaardt replied on Tue, 2009/05/26 - 12:23pm

Google app engine does respect servlets and jpa but at a version that may be older than what your app requires. It's akin to having PHP 4 app server when you have something written in PHP 5 with objects. There definetly is a problem space with apps bleeding over on memory, and what we need is a more "Cloud" computing friendly java app server.

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