JBoss Seam running under OpenJDK (IcedTea) in Fedora 8
by Karsten Wade
JBoss Seam developer and Red Hatter/JBossian Pete Muir has posted about running Seam under IcedTea, the implementation of OpenJDK available in Fedora 8.
Pete ran a “highly unscientific test” and found out that IcedTea outperformed other JDKs:
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.
It is very interesting. There are a number of paths that come from IcedTea being in Fedora:
- JBoss apps can now be compiled natively on Fedora, meaning we are going to start seeing all these packages available in Fedora
- There is another, viable JRE available to developers, one that is free in all the senses of the word
- If Pete’s unscientific tests are any indication, things are “definitely going in the right directions” for performance of the fully open stack
In the cycle of which Fedora becomes which version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it is a future version of Fedora (either 9 or 10) that is going to be the codebase that is branched for RHEL. This means IcedTea technologies are going to receive at least one more full distribution development cycle. The proper jargon for this is, “Well baked technology”
As the GNU Classpath and gcj initiatives have shown, providing a fully free JRE helped convince Sun the time was right to open source Java. By the time RHEL 6 is out, there are likely to be >1 fully free, fully open source JREs for you to choose from.
Combine this with a little virtualization and appliance OS builds, and you’ve got segregated app servers running individual JVMs that you can turn on and off like water.