Note: Currenlty this application needs Cocoon 1.7.4 to run. You can download JBoss(2.0)/Tomcat(3.2.1) and Cocoon(1.7.4) preconfigured from here. This should run on NT/2000 and Linux.

Presently in the opensource community there exists all the tools to make a good application server. By a good application server I mean an EJB server that is EJB 1.1 complient, a servlet container that is Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 complient, a secure reliable scalable HTTP server and a scalable ACID complient database. All of these exist in the form of JBoss/Tomcat/Apache/PostgreSQL/MySQL. However what is lacking is a good HOWTO to connect them all together.

JBoss (A EJB 1.1 Container): http://www.jboss.org/
Tomcat (A Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 Container): http://jakarta.apache.org/
Apache (A HTTP server): http://www.apache.org/
PostgreSQL (A ACID compliant DataBase): http://www.postgres.org/
Cocoon (A XML/XSLT framework servlet): http://xml.apche.org/cocoon

There is a very good article on howto connect Apache/Tomcat/Cocoon/JBossInterbase avaliable at http://www.catgen.com/developer/manual/jboss-installation.html

However, there are a couple of issues with this HOWTO .First, it would be benifical to be able to used Tomcat/JBoss in the same VM. However this leads to problems when trying to connect Apache at the front end. A good link on hwto to connect Apache to JBoss with embedded Tomcat can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com/jboss-user@lists.sourceforge.net/msg06241.html. I would also like to see the orginal HOWTO extended to be backed with PostgreSQL or MySQL.

Another problem seems to be trying to deploy the Cocoon servlet into JBoss with embedded Tomcat and this becomes further complicated when trying to bolt Apache on to the front end. It appeares that the XML parsers of Cocoon and JBoss clash.