Java.net App Hosting

Hong Zhang's Blog mentions that java.net is now hosting J2EE applications for free through LocalWeb. Here's the quote that scares me:

> The actual deployment of an application is done by a small team of engineers from Sun.

Yikes. Even with all the deployment descriptors, it takes "a small team" to host and deploy a single J2EE application. There's something wrong with that.

I've always said that deploying Java applications is Java's Achilles Heel. The LAMP community mocks Java not necessarily because the language is more verbose, but because it's so dang hard to deploy the applications. Compare with PHP, which is as easy as editing the file and then hitting reload in your browser. That's nearly impossible with a full J2EE application. So many libraries have memory leaks that play havoc with classloaders that a full application server restart is required.

In any case, this is one of the main reasons I've been moving to Rails. I can deploy an application in no time (especially when using SwitchTower).

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