Thoughts Electrique

I recently set up a new XWiki 2.0 instance (with MySQL) for documentation purposes. Although some of the steps are already described in the XWiki manual I’ll document it here mainly because I keep forgetting things. Also step-by-step tutorials come in handy when you’re in a hurry.

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As you may remember from my last blogpost I’m currently setting up a new hosting Server. Since this server will also host some OpenCms and JEE sites I need to set up a Servlet Container. In almost all of my projects until today Tomcat was successfully used for this purpose. Be it stand alone or embedded in a JEE application server (e.g. JBoss).

I must admit that I always had some kind of a love-hate relationship with Tomcat. The classloader had some bad issues when reloading a webapplication too often and often killed the complete server. Taking down all of the other webapplications too. Although this has gotten a lot better recently it’s still bothering me a bit.

Since I had some time after my last project I started investigating other open source alternatives. I often heard of Jetty, praised for it’s speed and simplicity, it seemed like a great alternative and I played around with it a bit. I really liked it since it was simple to use and easy to deploy but as I started to google for things like performance measurements or how to use it with a security manager I didn’t really found a lot of documentation (compared to Tomcat) and the performance doesn’t really doesn’t seem to differ from Tomcats.

So I’m once again going the Tomcat route. It has a big community and is even used in military and government organizations. It’s really not a technology decision (although I think Tomcat is solid) but more political thinking.

It will also save me some time which I can invest in trying out other technologies. Meow…