Speed up Weblogic Server startup times
At my work, we use Weblogic Server to host an enterprise portal. Which is fine.
However, I've recently had the opportunity to use Tomcat for some side projects, and I am struck by the incredible difference in speed. Tomcat takes 3-5 seconds to start up, and 10-15 seconds to deploy a medium-sized projects. Wewblogic takes 3-5 minutes to start, and up to 10 minutes to deploy. This kills any iterative development.
Am I going to have to resign myself to its being slow and bloated, or is there anything I can do to speed it up? Anyone have experience with this?
Answer
You will not be able to turn the frog into a princess. I would wonder slightly about those startup times for weblogic - they seem a bit excessive, you're not running on linux by any chance ?
If you're running nested archives (wars within ears etc) and also directory-scanning technologies (hibernate, spring etc), you may try unpacking it all to the corresponding exploded structure before deploying; it has been known to help a bit.
Tomcat contains a very small subset of the features weblogic has. We develop on jetty but deploy on weblogic for acceptance/production environments and this works fairly well. You can do the same with tomcat.
Tomcat is a fairly strict container whilst weblogic is lenient, so you'll normally have only minor troubles deploying to weblogic, especially as long as you continuously do both.
You can also use a tool like javarebel to do really nifty hot-deployment and avoid all those restarts.