RE: Glen’s comment:
Enter JRun4 from Macromedia (www.macromedia.com/jrun). This tool absolutely rocks! The admin tools are superb, and it just works!
I must admit that I’ve only ever had good experiences with JRun. However, for me, GUI admin tools (or any admin tools in general) don’t rank as a reason to use a particular J2EE container.
Admin tools are only useful for about 5-10% of a project; you know, that stage at the start of a project when you are trying to work out how-the-hell your particular J2EE container is meant to be configured. It is almost always a hard lesson to learn, but it is a lesson you only need to learn once in your life. And you don’t need the GUI admin tools at all if your container has good documentation.
After that, on a real project, you will have your server/app config as part of your software configuration management process (SCM); i.e. you will have it all checked and versioned and, most likely, part of your Ant script. I never seem to use the GUI again.
So, sure, GUI’s are good when learning about a product, but they aren’t a major factor when I’m evaluating a J2EE container. But then again, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way if I hadn’t hung around hard-core unix-sysadmins so much.
PS: GUI admin tools do end up being useful “in production”, apparently,
when you are monitoring the health of a running system, etc. But I’m a coder, not a
support engineer, so why would I care about that?
2 Comments
The problem with GUIs on a production system is getting the GUI to work through the security system. If it works, you’ve got to be concerned with your security setup
As for monitoring the health of the system, when the system itself is under load, the GUI is usually unusable. I prefer getting onto the box in text mode 
At Christmas there are no coders – only support engineers.
I remember when WebLogic only came with a GUI admin tool (version 6). It caused so much grief that WebLogic 6.1 onwards again supported being able to administer the server without a GUI.