The first step of installing Jboss and Glassfish appserver

Both Jboss and Glassfish application server provide an installer in the form of a self-contained jar file. Users can just download this jar file and run java command to install it in any platform.

To install Jboss appserver 4.0.5:

java -jar jems-installer-1.2.0.GA.jar

To install Glassfish, according to the instruction:

java -Xmx256m -jar glassfish.jar

Jboss jar is around 71M and glassfish zip 60M in size, and I think they are roughly comparable. But notice the difference in JVM options. I don't like having to use -jar option to run a jar file (see my previous post). Glassfish installer needs yet another more advanced JVM option. There is a big difference in usability between running it without options and running it with one or more options. The more options, the more chances for errors.

To be fair to glassfish, I tried java -jar glassfish.jar without -Xmx256m to see if I get OutOfMemoryError. The installation completes in a couple of seconds without any problem, with JDK 1.4.2, JDK 5, or JDK 6 on Windows XP. So it seems safe to just run java -jar glassfish.jar to install it.

[update 1/1/2007]: In Glassfish V2 update 1 released in 12/2007, you do need -Xmx256m option to install it. Glassfish V2U1 may have added more stuff that takes more memory.

[update 11/24/2008]: Changed -Xmx256 to -Xmx256m. Reader Bartek pointed out this error in the comment.

Tags: jboss, glassfish, java-jar, java