infoanarchy has an iRATE review posted. I wish people wouldn't complain so much about prerelease software. I put a lot of work into the 0.2 pre-release and it's disappointing to see somebody brushing it off due to non-programming issues.
This fella happened to use it on a system with freetif(swt loves openmotif..one can get gtk2 to work too). Freetif bugs made iRATE 0.2 draw buggily, so instead of figuring out what's wrong, he complains about bugs in 0.2. If he bothered to look though the mailing list archives, mailing us or tried my tarballs, this wouldn't be an issue. Oh well.
Servlets
I've been working with clientside java since java 1.0. I was never a big fan of the java vm for user apps. Java VMs are huge and take quite a while to initialize. For example on my computer ant takes longer to startup than to compile iRATE.
Some people say that java is better on the serverside. Well, I tried tomcat/jetty and it hurts to watch JSP pages compile. I can now see why people hate search crawlers on sites full of java/asp.net stuff.
It seems that once the jsp/server compiles/JITs the perfomance is acceptible.
I generally like to quickly test my programs every time I change some code. With these compilation delays, life is painful on my laptop 700mhz/128ram vaio.
As a workaround, I've been working on a gcj/cgi-bin servlet container. Eventually I might even turn it into an apache module for perfomance reasons. With gcj compilation is fast and hitting the servlet doesn't make make my laptop cry. The other advantage of this implementation is the coolness factor. It's much cooler to compile & run java as standalone programs as opposed to processing them with a vm :)
Thanks gcj people :)
Anyways, as of right now my proof-of-concept servlet runs and I plan to turn this into a proof-of-concept cgi iRATE http server.