Move over Tomcat, here is Jetty

Posted by Pepijn Oomen Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:02:29 GMT

I must say that I like Tomcat a lot, but after installing blojsom on my production server, I found that the performance was not really what I hoped for (well, heck, this is site is running on a 166 MHz Pentium, with 80Mb RAM, what would you expect).

So I took up Jetty once more, and while the configuration is really quite horrible, it does provide for enormous flexibility. I was capable of stripping it down to its bare (plus) bones which left me with a package of 1.4Mb. It’s memory footprint is also significantly smaller than that of Tomcat. But I don’t think that on a properly scaled machine, performance will really be that much of an issue.

The thing that really bothers me now is that to be able to run my main site I had to work around a `XDoclet` issue when generating a servlet spec 2.4 compliant `web.xml`. It turned out that the `taglib` configuration needs to be encapsulated in a `jsp-config` element, something XDoclet does not do (yet). Tomcat 5 does not seem to be bothered about this, but Jetty 5 chokes on it.

So I had to make a choice:

1. Downgrade the whole lot to 2.3,
2. Fixup the `web.xml` with a custom stylesheet,
3. Fixup the XDoclet `webdoclet` task.

I opted for the first option for now, but I’ll probably use some spare time to make some effort for getting the last option to work.