I am testing quite a few Application Servers and Tools in regards to certain parameters (I will talk about some of these in further posts).
From startup time to deployment time and to memory consumption most of the application servers could be called sometimes a developers nightmare. In some cases going to minutes just to deploy a very simple EJB application (The machine where I am doing this has reasonable specs like 768 MB memory). I know that on a production environment most of these problems are of minimal importance, but when developing they clearly cause a productivity problem.
Regarding deployment times and lightness, of the application servers tested, JBoss is the clear winner, by far, making it the only application server suited for development (when you have tight development/unit test cycles, which is my case).
Some application servers, when used with the IDE from the same vendor tend to a bit (but not much) better (mainly because of programmatic integration of deployment). But is this a good thing? I suppose its better to have a market where different components (like app servers and IDEs) can be plugged at will with the same level of integration, thus increasing competition and choice on the component level. Using the best app server with the best IDE even if that means different vendors.
Please share your thoughts
Filed in: Java
