Frank, I'm curious, why do you want such a thing in the first place?
Eduardo, I'm pretty sure that WAF thing from Red Hat is not
what Frank is looking for.
By c. mid 2001 at ArsDigita, there had been two Java-based versions of
the ACS. The first one was essentially a direct port of the Tcl parts
of ACS 3.4 to JSP. A small team did that, probably led by Jin Choi.
That's what Philip and Frank are talking about. It was said to work
just fine, but I don't think it was ever used on a real project.
Being JSP rather than J2EE, it was believed (not sure by who;
presumably management and/or the "core team") to be "not Java enough".
(I don't know if that was real feedback from a real person, or just
the imputed views of the coveted Fortune 500 customers.)
Thus, that JSP version was quickly discarded in favor of work on a new
J2EE-based ACS. That version of ACS Java was, I believe,
based on the then-new ACS 4.0 or 4.2 data model, with shiny new J2EE
stuff on top; Tomcat servlets, XSLT, and I don't know what else. It
also included lots of other very complicated sounding brand-new stuff,
like an object-relational mapping layer. That J2EE-based ACS was used
on at least one large client project, Deutsche Post, and probably some
others. The limited feedback I heard on that toolkit was pretty
negative... but that's the beast that lived on at Red Hat and
presumably eventually evolved into WAF.
That was all a long time ago now and I had no direct involvement with
any of the Java stuff, being busy with my own unrelated projects. If
for some reason it's important to nail down though, there are bunches
of ex-aD folk out there who actually worked on or with one or more of
the ACS Java toolkits, and could no doubt give a more complete answer.
