The tiny app platform

small..tiny..those were the keywords with which I went shopping for a database and an app server. The client of course, was to be the browser, so I didnt bother too much about that one - the idea being that the one external piece of software the "app anywhere" platform would depend on would be the browser. How naive I was in those early days!

Back to the db and App Server in the meanwhile.

I'd used hsqldb before, so that was an obvious choice for a free, opensource java db. So that was that as far as the backend was concerned.

As for the app server - any EJB server was out of the question because a) anything that verbose didnt come without flab and more importantly b) because i just dont like EJB :). Hey its my app, i make the rules!

I'd been a big fan of vqServer a while ago and went looking for it, but seems to have not been updated lately, so I looked at the other good thing I knew about - jetty. The latest docs seemed to show much promise, and at 20-some-odd MB, a real good fit for my purpose.

Time to get a little organized. So I started with the primordial directory structure:

(Not shown: hsqldb.jar in the jetty/ext dir)






And then I came upon this superb writeup on creating exactly what I wanted. The author intended it to be a "run-from-cd" app, but cd to pen drive is a short sneeze away. And the util servlets absolutely were the topping!