Question

Is it possible to form a cluster in which there are different types of application servers? For instance, 1 JBoss, 1 Glassfish and 1 WebSphere? Lets assume we are using EJB3.0.
Stateless session beans should be relatively easy and simple load balancing among the instances should do the work, but what about SFSBs and session replication? Is it possible to utilize some cache storage like infinispan for it?

I would appreciate any comments or sharing your experience on this topic.

Answer 1

The responce is simply NO. Clusturing is a non standard feature, it is up to the Java EE implementation to provide clustoring keeping standard behaviour (with very litle constrains, as stickiness is expected and session object are expected to be serializable) and no interoperability is forseen.

You can of course made the cluster your self, setting up an external data grid to serve as session store and manage your self the cache, but then you will lose any framework functionality related to the session (you will need to do every thing by your self) and what the point any more to use a full Java EE application server. Yes you will then need to forget about SFSBs.

I am ready curous what issue you want to solve by this type of architecture. I don’t see any that can over come the cost of maintining 3 differents apps (app server have slite difference on the dev side) and more importantly 3 differents infrastructure operation stack (on this side there is lot of difference, so you need to multiply the opperation team knowlages).