I've just installed Fedora 8 on my ThinkPad X60, and as it comes with packages for Iced Tea (Red Hat's version of OpenJDK), I thought I would take the Seam Booking Example out for a spin.
Well, it was a very pleasant experience - I booted the Fedora KDE LiveCD, and ran the Fedora installer from the desktop which took about 20 minutes. Once I had rebooted, I used the package manager to the /Java Development/ set of packages (which gave me Iced Tea and ant). I then downloaded and unzipped JBoss AS 4.2.2.GA and Seam 2.0.0.GA, deployed the booking example, started JBoss AS, and booked myself a suite!
I did notice that the application seemed more faster than normal, so I took a look at my favourite completely subjective performance measure -- how long it takes JBoss AS to start with just the booking example deployed -- and it seemed good at around 20s.
This piqued my interest, so I did a highly unscientific test and installed the Sun JDK 1.5.0_14 and the Sun JDK 1.6.0_03, and (using Seam and the example compiled by JDK 1.5) took a look at how long the server takes to start.
I found that using JDK 5 to boot the server it took 32s, using JDK 6 it took 25s and using Iced Tea (JDK 7) 21s -- definitely going in the right directions! I then compiled Seam and the example using Iced Tea, and (running JBoss AS using Iced Tea) got a startup time around 19-20s.
Of course, this no match for a real performance test, but I found it interesting.
Hi,
I also just installed Fedora 8 and IcedTea today. But when I searched for JBoss in the package-manager it found nothing (I was looking for JBoss tools). I haven't looked more into it. JBoss and JBoss tools are packaged for Fedora, right?
Thanks Anders
Much of the JBoss code has not been packaged for Fedora, precisely because of the lack of a fully open source JDK to ship as a dependency for the packages. With OpenJDK and IcedTea now in Fedora, JBoss packages that require a JRE to be present can be submitted into Fedora. I hope we start seeing a flood of packages from jboss.org.
It would be great to see JBoss Tools either bundled with /Fedora Eclipse/ or available as an addon package in the package manager and JBoss AS as part of the /Java Development/ package group.
Maybe an /Enterprise Java Development/ group of packages is needed?
While you say that your tests are not scientific, they are really the only tests that matter. If you were to tell me that the results of a formal ultra-scientific and statistically significant benchmark showed that X JVM was faster than Y JVM, but that JBoss AS (or any other Java application we use on a daily basis) takes longer to start with X JVM, then I would consider the benchmark crap (and meaningless).
We run Ant, Maven and JBoss hundreds of times a day. That's what matters. I'm moving to OpenJDK!
Dan, IMO, this performance metric has two problems
So, it's only anecdotal evidence (but still interesting, and I think probably true!). Also, I thought the performance jump from Java 5 to Java 6 was noticeable, and another reason for JBoss to get the AS running well on Java 6.