Towards an Easy-to-Use Web Application Server and Cloud PaaS for Web Development Education

Traditional Java Enterprise Edition(EE)-based application servers are powerful, but complex solutions requiring a comparably high administration effort and a steep learning curve to be used efficiently. However, e.g. For Java-based web development education a more easy-to-use platform is desired. In addition, to design a future PaaS cloud environment for education a lightweight, highly scalable and ressource-efficient platform is required. Therefore, in this paper a solution for building an easy-to-use, lightweight application server environment for hosting PHP or Java EE-based web applications is proposed, which is based on open source software (OSS) components. Evaluation results for the proposed solution with respect to its practical use in a classroom setting as well as its performance and scalability are presented. These results indicate that the approach is promising regarding its ease-of-use by students and even outperformes an established Java EE application server with respect to response time.