Re:Packr – Packages Java apps for distribution on Windows, L...
by parasubvert on Monday May 05, 2014 @11:56PM
(#7702760)
1 and 2 are fine points, point 3 to me is what I was getting at, just with a more portable system rather than something cloud-provider specific
Containers are exciting precisely because they don't care about how good or crappy your language interpreter or app server happens to be, whether you run your own data center or use a cloud, etc.
In Java land, you can accomplish that by:
1) Embedding the application server in your own binary; eg, Tomcat and Jetty et al have simple APIs that you can use to run the app server, or
2) Simply packaging them up in a single directory next to each other, or
3) Treating the app server as a deployment fabric (ala Amazon Elastic Beanstalk) and versioning the app server and the wars separately, which has some mighty fine maintenance and deployment advantages.
The only thing you have to do is wire your server into the platform's init scripts, and everything else is self-contained.