Blogging Roller

Congrats are also in order for the JSPWiki team. As Janne Jalkanen notes, JSPWiki was accepted into the Apache Incubator yesterday. I'm proud to be one of the four mentors who will guide the project through the incubation process. Janne and the JSPWiki team put together a great proposal and I think it was clear to everybody involved in the vote that these folks know what they're doing. They'll master the Apache way in no time.

Yes this is my obligatory Glassfish V2 post but listen, for me V2 is a pretty big big deal. Like Eclipse, which was the IDE that pulled me away from VIM, Glassfish V2 is the app server that finally pulled me away from Tomcat.

You see, I've been using Tomcat every day for a very long time. I started back in 2000 when I worked at HAHT Software and I was working on the new "Rocketsled" J2EE version of the HAHTsite app server. We were ripping out the old proprietary page engine and plugging in Tomcat. It was a pleasure to work with and I learned a hell of a lot from the code-base. After joining Sun and switching from Eclipse to Netbeans because Sun-on-Sun matters, I still stuck with Tomcat. It's what we were using for blogs.sun.com and Glassfish was just too bulky and slow. I grew to love Netbeans, but I couldn't stomach Glassfish, until now.

Now that Glassfish V2 is out I'm switching from Tomcat to Glassfish for all of my development. It's more than fast enough. With Glassfish on my MacBook Pro, Roller restart time is about 8 seconds compared to 16 with Tomcat. And the quality is high; the admin console, the asadmin command-line utility and the docs are all excellent. The dog food is surprisingly tasty ;-)

Congrats to the Glassfish team!