As a Java developer, I thought this article had some interesting information about logging and monitoring. However, the deployment section had my scratching my head a little.
I've never totally understood why people want to make fat jars. It seems like a process full of headaches since you can't have jars in jars. Wouldn't it be much easier to create a regular zip file with a small script to set the classpath and and run the project?
I'm not sure I understand the motivation for embedded instead of standalone servlet container. The article linked to some slides but they mostly seemed be demonstrating that you can function using an embedded container rather than providing clear benefits. Maybe it would have made more sense with the associated talk.
Can anyone provide more insight to these?
Author here. A capsule is not necessarily a fat jar. It can point to Maven dependencies that are downloaded on the first launch, and can later be shared by other capsules. A zip with startup scripts is OK, but it requires installation.
As to full blown app servers vs embedded servers, I think it's the other way around. It's the big app servers that require justification, as they are a lot more cumbersome to set up and deploy.
You wouldn't do this for a production deployment, right? Application starup that may or may not require access to the artifact repository to complete successfully. When that idea bounces around my developer neocortex, my sysadmin hindbrain starts reaching forward to strangle it.
And if you're not going to do it in production, doing it in development means having a gratuitous difference between development and production, which, again, is something i have learned to fear.
A zip with startup scripts is OK, but it requires installation.
'gradle installApp' works out of the box, and 'installs' the jars and scripts in your build directory, which is all you need to run locally. It's work of minutes to write an fpm [1] invocation that packages the output of installApp as an operating system package, which you can then send down the pipe towards production. This is simple, easy, standard, and fully integrated with a world of existing package management tools. Why would i use Capsule instead of doing this?