Extreme Java

After a couple of years developing webapps, I’m starting to get problems to design a non-web UI. Not a big deal, since I only use Swing on personal projects. The biggest problem with web projects is the need of at least a servlet container. If you host a lot of projects, Tomcat, JBoss, Glassfish and Geronimo are good choices. But, if you need to host only one “web-container-only” project, Jetty or Winstone are way better.

I’m planning to use maven instead of ant for all of my projects, both personal and professional. It is easier to maintain and more IDE-portable. When I’m developing, I can use “maven jetty:run” to automatically compile and start Jetty (ctrl-c ends the server). The whole process is faster than a “ant dist / deploy / OOM / kill -9″ when using Tomcat. You only need to add jetty plugin to your POM (inside “project > build > plugins”):

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <contextPath>/</contextPath>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

This is useful to develop, but, when I want to create the “executable WAR”, I prefer using Winstone - it’s even lighter than Jetty. This means I need another plugin:

<plugin>
  <groupId>net.sf.alchim</groupId>
  <artifactId>winstone-maven-plugin</artifactId>
</plugin>

Running “winstone:embed” will create a “xxx-standalone.jar” on “target” folder. This JAR can be run with “java -jar” and your application becames avaliable on “http://localhost:8080/”. This plugin has a lot of configurations, and, using maven, you can configure it to run this goal on package phase. Read its manual for more information.