Tomcat 6.0 & Java SE 6 : Lightning fast !!

I have just configured my petproject to use Java SE 6 and Tomcat 6.0. I was not planning to use any of the new language features of Java 6 yet, since I am not really into scripting and have no need for on-the-fly compiling or a in-memory database. But I do read on the Sun site that a lot of people experience a performance boost when using Java 6 (25-30% due to the official site). After configuring my application to use Java 6 and Tomcat 6.0 (which was only a ten minute job, using the new Eclipse Europe JEE Edition) I could not agree more.

My server used to take about 40 seconds to start, mainly because of all of the Spring beans (I have about 60 of them). But now, only after 20 seconds, I am ready to go and test the deployed application. Same goes for my unit and integration tests. While they used to take over a minute to run, all tests are now completed in 36 seconds.

THIS ROCKS !!

WebOnSwing - Echo-alike

Just found an interesting J2EE View framework that I had never heard off before. It's called WebOnSwing and due to its demo on the site it supports creation of pages using the Eclipse Visual Swing Editor with simple drag and drop. It seems pretty familiar to Echo2 although Echo2 seems to be more eye-candy. An interesting feature of using WebOnSwing is that both a Swing component model can be used, together with an html visualization, so more control of the html output is offered than is the case with Echo2. Definitely take a look at the movie on their site !!