Winstone

Winstone is an efficient servlet container that provides excellent servlet functionality. Unlike other servlet containers that comply fully with J2EE and require excessive space, Winstone works without the bloat. This container is not designed to support extraneous APIs that are not related to Servlets such as EJBs, JNDI, and JavaMail. It is designed to provide simple and efficient servlet functionalities without all the unnecessary baggage.

Winstone is a perfect choice when you need a simple servlet container that just goes. This container is suited for environments where you only need fast, reliable servlet container functionality for a single web app per server. The core distribution jar is kept to a minimum size of 160 KB. Additionally, configuration files are minimized and command-line options are used to override sensible compiled-in defaults.

Winstone has not yet compiled with GCJ to make a 3-4 MEG windows exe for local development or deployment of servlets as there are GCJ class loading problems. JSP compilation is an optional feature supported using Apache's Jasper.

To get started with Winstone, download and install Apache Maven. Unpack the tree by following the instructions to build Winstone. The winstone.jar file will be present in the target directory after the build is complete. To run Winstone, use the java -jar command with the appropriate options. You can either use --webroot, --warfile, --webappsDir or --hostsDir options to provide the necessary arguments.

In summary, Winstone is an ideal container for developers who require a lightweight and simple servlet container that works efficiently for a single web app per server.