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Tomcat 5.0 Released
aquarium writes "The Apache Jakarta Project announces the release of the first stable version of Tomcat 5.0. Improvements include performance optimizations, scalability and reliability enhancements, and improved Taglibs handling."
Why should Solaris be the leading Java OS? Only because Sun delivers both?
Following this logic would impose the question why no IBM OS shows up in the first ranks although they provide a Java implementation as well.
I think this figures more or less represent Java's overall OS-related deployment numbers (on Server machines).
The Java VM on Solaris isn't particularly good. Funny enough, Sun's VM written for Windows performs much better.
This could explain that.
Packages, as a namespace boundary separating functional areas of a program, do add a nice chunk of metadata for compilers and debuggers to work with. PHP, by throwing everything into one giant flat namespace, reminds me far too much of C -- in other words, fine if you're dealing with legacy code that uses it, but not exactly where I want to be if I'm trying to be produce quality code.
However, I think that the runtime cost of interpreting a handful of source scripts for each webapp request is really quite minor compared to, say, the cost of opening a connection to a remote service, (RMI/EJB, SQL server, or whatever) marshalling and unmarshalling a series of data structures over that socket connection, generating return text from a template, and all the other work that makes up dynamic web page construction.
Pre-compiled modules are much more important for efficient distribution and deployment of code than they are for its execution. Being able to package an entire application into a single network-transferrable file is by far the most useful contribution of the Servlet container specs -- just drop that WAR file into your apps directory, and off you go.