Pebble Rocks!

Yes, Spring Mania (and no, I don't mean "March Madness" although it certainly fits!) has kept me up again. Either that or the first decent Italian Beef I had at Portillo's this evening.

So the only more fun than building Virtual Machines, is installing .war's. One of the areas where J2EE (or a subset thereof, in my case meaning Tomcat) has got Python and Ruby beat is the ease of deploying apps. No GEM interrogation (selection 1, 2, or 3) dependencies or Cheese Shop silliness (don't even get me talking about the Turbogears Python installer, almost as bad as compiling uClinux (which also rocks, BTW). Untar, find the .war, browse, deploy go to the URL.

On the wiki front Snipsnap and JSPWiki are pretty good that way, but I'm impressed with Pebble. It literally only took 10 minutes to get a first blog, and that was after pulling down a JDK, Tomcat 5.5.23 (which apparently fixed a bug with the manager servlet bug I ran into several weeks back when I was trying to the JSON-RPC server demo to work?!) set JAVA_HOME, change tomcat-users.xml.

And what's amazing it is quick and even with all this cruft:

root@ubuntu:~/apache-tomcat-5.5.23/webapps/pebble/WEB-INF/lib# ls
acegi-security-1.0.1.jar jstl-1.1.2.jar
asm-1.5.3.jar log4j.jar
asm-attrs-1.5.3.jar lucene-1.4.1.jar
asm-util-1.5.3.jar oro-2.0.8.jar
cglib-2.1_3.jar pebble-2.0.1.jar
commons-beanutils.jar radeox-1.0-beta2.jar
commons-codec-1.3.jar saxpath.jar
commons-collections-3.1.jar spring-beans-1.2.8.jar
commons-fileupload-1.0.jar spring-context-1.2.8.jar
commons-httpclient-3.0-rc3.jar spring-core-1.2.8.jar
commons-lang-2.1.jar spring-dao-1.2.8.jar
commons-logging-1.0.4.jar spring-web-1.2.8.jar
delicious-1.10.jar standard-1.1.2.jar
ehcache-1.2.1RC.jar tidy.jar
jcaptcha-all-1.0-RC3.jar xmlrpc-1.2-b1.jar

Of course this is within a VM with 384MB on a 2.8ghz/2G Pentium-D, but am I tempted to try this on a 96M Xen slice?

Thanks, but no thanks I'll stick with blogger.