Sun's Application Server 8

One of the most useful aspects, going in, is the verifier. When you deploy, you can ask it to run through a series of checks to see that the component is "safe to deploy," applying a serious number of tests.

I'm generally pretty good at J2EE, but the thing reported nine errors on a first run, which really surprised me. Mostly, they were errors referring to implementations of classes that should have been in my code, but weren't, because my code never needed them. (It's that XP mentality: I coded exactly what I needed to get my client code running properly, no more, and no less.)

I really thought the reporting of the errors could have been made more obvious ("COULD NOT DEPLOY: -->LOOK HERE!<--") but once I found the logs (which was a matter of looking at the server logs as they were generated), it was pretty easy to figure out after a full scan of the file.

It tells you everything that passed, then everything that wasn't applied... and then the failures. I'd have thought it'd have told you the failures first, since that's the most important part of the report.

Minor issues, in the long run. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised at the efficiency of the verifier - and now I'm after figuring how to to find the reference to my deployed object. *sigh*