Winstone Servlet Container v0.8 released[ Go to top ]Posted by: Rick Knowles Posted on: January 24 2006 21:23 EST in response to Rick Knowles
A couple of replies:
1) Why duplicate it when jetty sounds similar ?
Because I guess the devil is in the detail. I always felt that the really crappy thing about containers (as they were) was how even the smallest, Jetty, at that time required a >1MB download, and required property file adjustments etc before even the simplest webapp could be launched. Winstone doesn't need that, just "java -jar winstone.jar <webroot/warfile>".
Once you use it, it feels quite different to Jetty, especially on deployment. The decomposability and embeddability make it great for junit testing etc as well.
2) Why not just contribute to an established project ?
This is the kind of thing only people who have never tried to do it will say. The percentage of OSS projects that will not tell you you're off your rocker if you propose something that's not on their roadmap is very small. Especially if it's something that isn't a feature per-se like size or startup time. Hang around on the *-devel lists of some of the containers, and you'll get what I mean. Some of them are downright hostile, newbies are like targets.
Then there's the learning curve: in the beginning, you have no idea what the quality of the internal code is like, and how fragile most of it is. You have no way of knowing whether a particularly ugly line of code is required, and if I try to clean it up, will I break something somewhere else. Combine that with the "it's already perfect, nothing to see/do here" attitude that prevails on the dev lists, and writing a container from scratch comes out on top on costs vs benefits.
3) Size, speed and startup time advantages ?
My experience for startup is typically 2-300ms plus webapp startup time (once the JVM libs are loaded). To be truthful, I've found the biggest use is as a dev tool, since it's small enough to check into CVS with each project and add a Maven/Ant task to launch it. It's nice to be able to say to new devs on your webapp project "just check out of cvs and run maven clean winstone then open your browser" for a full build/deploy cycle. They can use whatever container they want later, but for quick and dirty it's already there.
Anyway, if you're unsure please download the jar a try it, it's only 160KB for the lite version. Even dialup can handle that, and it won't take more than 5 minutes.
Rick