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Java Programming GNU is Not Unix

Resin Released Under GPL 50

Posted by CowboyNeal from the choices-are-good dept.
JohnA writes "I can't believe this hasn't received more attention than it has, but Caucho Software released their award-winning Java application server Resin under the GPL. This means that you are no longer bound to Tomcat and its less-than-stellar performance when deploying Java-based web apps."
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Resin Released Under GPL More

Resin Released Under GPL

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  • Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)

    by klui ( 457783 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @10:23PM (#10466633)
    From 3.0.9's description:...

    "The Resin distribution for 3.0.9 has been refactored into two distributions:

    * Resin Professional - Most companies and organizations will use Resin Professional. Includes performance, caching, and clustering capabilities.
    * Resin Open Source (GPL) - Contains all functional components of Resin, including EJB, but excludes performance and clustering capabilities. "

    So, it looks like not all of Resin's performance is in the Open Source version. It would be interesting if someone were to compare the performance of Tomcat vs Resin Open Source.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)

      by zaqattack911 ( 532040 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @11:30PM (#10466718) Journal
      Yeah I hate half assed gpl where they claim you're running a rechid turd of a server if you don't have the pro version.

      Clustering I can understand they don't include in the GPL version. But caching? doesn't tomcat at least do some caching.

      And what does "excludes performance" mean? wtf.. they took their mature software and "removed" performance from it? Sounds like BS.

      Maybe they just run a bunch of Thread.sleep() calls randomly in their code in the GPL version :)

      --Etan
      • Note that the description says that the Pro version has performance, caching, and clustering. The OSS version does not have performance and clustering. This statement would imply that caching is included. I would have lumped performance and caching together, but maybe their marketing department felt otherwise.

      • Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dtfinch ( 661405 ) *
        Even php has performance features removed. It keeps Zend in the business of selling products to make php faster.
      • Well, since it is open-source now you may want to remove those random Thread.sleep() calls yourself.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by rixdaffy ( 138224 ) *

      well, since it's GPL... wouldn't it be funny if the community decides to fork the opensourced code to include their own version of caching and clustering.

      I worked a lot with resin at my previous job and the caching is pretty good & useful.

      I don't think Tomcat does much caching... only caching of jsp compiled code, but I having a jsp engine which doesn't do that is unworkable.

      Now that I think of it, if I remember correctly, the resin source was always available. Maybe it's just that they changed the l
    • I've been using Resin for a couple of years now. Without the caching and clustering since I have my own caching mechanism and don't need clustering.

      That said I can recommend Resin to anyone (that needs an app-server or a servlet container) for its performance and (now with the new Linux NPTL threads) also scalability. I've been making websites with Java (first on OS/2) since 1998 and have used quite a few app servers until I ran into Resin 2 or 3 years ago. Haven't thought about looking any further since.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:2)

      by Tet ( 2721 ) *
      It would be interesting if someone were to compare the performance of Tomcat vs Resin Open Source.

      Having evaluated Resin as a possible replacement for our current Tomcat setup, we found it to be about half the speed of Tomcat[1]. So Resin without the performance bits would be very slow indeed. It's also worth noting that Resin is apalling in terms of being shipped in a deployable state (it isn't). We needed to write decent start/stop scripts, and move the logs to somewhere sensible, for example.

      [1] FWIW

  • Who ever said Java was slow? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Johnny Doughnuts ( 767951 ) * on Thursday October 07, 2004 @10:24PM (#10466637)
    http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/features/jspvsperl php.xtp [caucho.com]

    Keep this in mind when reading those benchmarks:

    The server is a 266 Mhz Pentium II running RedHat 6.0 with 64 meg of ram. The client is a 300 Mhz Celeron also running RedHat 6.0 with 32 meg. The two machines are connected with a 100bT ethernet connection.

    I'm considering deploying this on my person webserver now.
    • Indeed. Java, which compiles to native cpu byte code, is apparently faster than perl and php, which don't (that I've heard of.) I didn't see any CGI/C tests nor mod_my_custom_code/apache. Valid tests here, but more comprehensiveness would have been nice. Anyone have that for me? (Nope, not language trolling today. Honest question.)
      • Who would ever be stupid enough to actually code a website in C? You may as well go with Brainfuck while you're at it. It seems (to me) that valid competition is from Perl and PHP on the OSS side and .NET on the Windows side.

        Sure you could make a custom mod in C/C++ for apache but I doubt you'd win that much performance and it'd be a bitch to code. Why not do your own HTTP server while you're at it?
        • In other words, you don't know what the difference is, and you've fallen prey to the idea that C/C++ are hard to code? You're right though -- anytime you code anything in C, you should recode everything else too. Maybe the same should be true of PHP and Perl, too.
      • Actually, Perl and PHP do compile to their own opcode trees which get cached (by default in Perl or with an "accelerator" in PHP). Despite the flawed benchmark shown here, mod_perl is faster than Caucho. See this benchmark [chamas.com] for more.
        • Why do I get the feeling that your cited benchmark started a JVM and immediately started hitting it? The server JVMs with Hotspot need warmup time so that they can do their code analysis. Since servers generally run for extended periods of time (months?), this is not an unfair requirement for testing.
          • Not correct. The benchmark ran Resin for several minutes. You can download the code and run it yourself, or e-mail the author of the benchmark with any questions you may have. A company I used to work for sent Caucho a correction for their benchmark code years (literally) ago and they wrote back acknowledging that they know very little about mod_perl, but they never updated the benchmark page.
    • Those stats are for Resin 1.1 and JDK 1.1.8.. We're several generations down the road bub.
    • Well, I installed the new Resin on Windows, and beside the fact that I didn't get it to work with Apache (it ignored the document root I had set), compilation took ages. Since I am developing and not only viewing the stuff, fast compilation is very important for me. PHP is lightyears faster here. Having said that, I am using an old Athlon 700. I could upgrade to get better performance, yet Java would always be slower than PHP, if you regard the compilation time as well.
    • This benchmark is both ancient and wrong. I can't speak for the PHP code, but the mod_perl code is not done in the way that an experienced mod_perl programmer would do it, and thus does not demonstrate the best performance mod_perl can give in this situation. It would be better to look at this benchmark [chamas.com] instead.

  • I didn't think Tomcat was an app server... (Score:5, Informative)

    by BeatdownGeek ( 687929 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @11:25PM (#10466687) Homepage
    I didn't think Tomcat was really considered an app server, since Tomcat doesn't support EJBs. Tomcat is just a "Servlet/ JSP container," which JBoss happens to use now in its app server.

    Shouldn't this be compared to JBoss or Sun's app server (I forget what they call it)?
    • My understanding (and quick Google search) is that an application server is just that: a server that runs dynamic applications (as opposed to just static HTML). Tomcat definitely runs applications (aka servlets), just not EJB applications (natively). Apache+PHP/Perl/[scripting engine] qualify as application servers as well. It may be better to refer to JBoss/Resin as EJB application servers, or EJB containers. But Resin is so dirt simple to install and use as a plain application server* that it competes
    • I don't think the definition of app server is "something that runs EJBs". You seem to be confusing one solution with a general concept.


      From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

      application server

      1. A {designer}'s or {developer}'s suite of {software} that helps {programmers} isolate the {business logic} in their {programs} from the {platform}-related code. {Application} {servers} can handle all of the {application} {logic} and {connectivity} found in {client-server} {


  • Resin was a working servlet/JSP engine while Tomcat was still just a wet dream.

    My company used it in an EBJ product I was working on at the time. It was a pleasure to work with.

    I'm glad it's GPLd now it might get the recognition it deserves.

  • No JNDI ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zaqattack911 ( 532040 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @12:11AM (#10467005) Journal
    This page seems to imply there is no JNDI in the GPL version... how can you do ejbs and all that stuff with no JNDI ?

    have a look here: http://caucho.com/index.xtp [caucho.com]

    Under " Resin® Professional" it explicitly says "JNDI" support, hinting that the GPL version doesn't include it.

    Can someone confirm/deny this?

  • Java S&M? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BigLinuxGuy ( 241110 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @12:13AM (#10467017)
    I never really considered myself bound to TomCat or any other servlet engine or application server (not to mention Java). There are too many options for Java and other languages for anyone with any sense to feel that way. JBoss, Apache Geronimo, sort of leap to mind as alternative J2EE app servers, likewise PHP, Python, and Perl all have quite workable (and scalable) application server capabilities behind a web server (just ask, er, Slashdot).

    These days I'm more interested in looking for ways to insulate myself and my customers from disruptive technologies rather than tie myself to a single solution. The OMG's MDA has promise, but to realize that approach requires tools to support it. AndroMDA will kick out Java, but little else. I'm just wondering when a group of software engineers will get together and create an Open Source MDA suite that allows language generators to be plugged in. Once those tools are in place and support any language (or have the capability to do so), the promise of MDA can be realized. Until then, I guess we have to type code the old fashioned way. :-(

    Remember the tired old adage, when the only tool you have in your toolbelt is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Master craftsmen have a number of tools and techniques at their disposal and don't have to settle for a single approach.

  • Tomcat catching up? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by crisco ( 4669 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @02:38AM (#10467628) Homepage
    According to this guy [raibledesigns.com], Tomcat 5 is faster than Resin 3 and Resin supposedly has some compatibility issues. Resin 2.x turned in a mixed performance.
    • We (Kelkoo [kelkoo.com] R&D) did recently a study of the performance of several servlet engines, including the last releases for Tomcat, Jitty and Resin. Tomcat and Jitty were the faster and the more robust. Jitty was a bit faster than Tomcat. Tomcat was a bit more robust then Jitty when stress-tested. I hope that GPLing Resin will make people enhance its performances.
    • The performance benchmarks on the Resin website are way out of date. I did some testing of my own years ago (Tomcat 3.1 days). Resin was faster than any other servlet engine out there, but its failure mode was catastrophic, so we chose to go with iPlanet instead (which came second in raw performance, and just kept on going as we piled on more users). Interestingly, Tomcat had the lowest performance of all the servers we tested, but it was the only other server still going at the end of the tests. It would b
      • The pre 4.0 versions of Tomcat where the so called "Servlet API reference implementations". Tehy where merly showcases how the specs are supposed to work.

        Tomcat is a serious Servlet engine since 4.1x and a pretty fast (more or less complete rewrite) since 5.0.

        As far as I know Tomcat 5.x is now in the top leage of server performance in serving static and dynamic content (faster than Apache).

        angel'o'sphere
  • ....its less-than-stellar performance....

    What the hack is that supposed to mean? Is "stellar performance" something good, or something bad? And is "less-then-stellar" then something good or something bad. I am sorry, but the meaning of this phrase escapes me.

    wordreference [wordreference.com] says "stellar" means "leading" or "starring". It still makes no sense.

    Can we please use language that is understandable by more people then just the author and his friends?

    • Gee, you must really be a blast at parties with such a deep sense of humor. Ever heard of terms like sarcasm and irony?
    • Less than stellar is (as some AC pointed out) an euphorism for "like crap" more or less. I assume you are not a native english speaker or you would have known that, idiomatic expressions typically have slightly unclear meanings but if you want to understand a language it's something that really pays off if you learn them. (Your language will seem a lot more natural if you use such expressions.)

      Unfortunately my quick search couldn't find any good online reference which contained this expression, I'm sure su

    • Stellar (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      Stellar means to be a star. So, I guess they mean Tomcat is unlikely to explode as a Supernova, before collapsing into a gigantic Black Hole.
    • Searching for the phrase "stellar performance" on google returns over 50000 hits. The author must have many friends...

      BTW, I'm not a native speaker of english, and I understood the phrase just fine. Maybe you should brush up your english a bit...
  • the latest tomcat 4 and 5 are even with the top servlet containers. In fact, tomcat is now in the top 5. A lot of hard working developers have spent the last 3 years improving the performance. Several of the developers have profiled tomcat4 and 5 aggressively to reduce memory usage, garbage collection and overall performance.

    talk about uninformed garbage.

  • A faculty member at my school was talking about running benchmarks on a various set of Java applications servers, including Oracle's, JBoss, and some others. I'm going to bring up this one to him and hopefully I'll have some unbiased results for you guys.

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