After having read the announce of the Winstone v0.8 release on TheServerSide, I decided to try the little beast out.

I like a lot of the things I see, it really seems lean and mean. The configuration can be quickly done on the command-line as arguments, or you can put it in a basic properties file. This makes it much easier to adopt for people that are used to unix-like applications and don't feel like juggling around with XML formats.

It's ability to launch war files immediately is particularly nice:

java -jar winstone-0.8.jar mywebapp.war

The servlet container starts up very quickly indeed and all the RIFE applications I threw at it worked just fine, even continuations-based features. They started up quite quickly too.

It's interesting how the author tries to offer neat little new features that you can't find anywhere else. I particularly liked that you can embed your war file into the Winstone jar and just ship it as one file.

Like this:

mv yourwar.war embedded.war
zip winstone-0.8.jar embedded.war
java -jar winstone-0.8.jar

However, then came the shock. Every feature indicates that it's a container that is aimed at embedding and easy distribution. I'm totally puzzled why the author decided to make it GPL! Who in his right mind creates a new project in already overcrowded domain and makes it less free than anything else out there! Winstone was nice to try out, but unless the author decides to adopt a commercial usage friendly license (like CDDL), it will remain a toy that I played a bit with and then threw away.