What is LightWeight Container

[Jessica James]

Hi Folks,

I have read many times the name lightweight container.. But i dont know the exact meaning of it..

Can you people help me out..

[Rahul Bhattacharjee]

I guess its a full blown container ,but is suited to be used for testing , not for production as this might not have all the features required for a production environment to reduce its CPU consumption and hence known as light weight container.Servlets are easy to deploy.

[Jessica James]

Hi..

Thanks for your reply..
Actually SPRING is reffered as Lightweight container and EJB is referred as a heavyweight one..
why its called so..

[Abhishek Asthana]

Hey Jessica,

I guess you got confused between 'container' and 'framework', coz SPRING is not a container, nor is EJB. Both are frameworks.
A framework is a set of pre-compiles class files,loads of XML files and some guidelines for developing applications using that framework. A layman's definition of how heavy or how light a framework depends on number of these classes/XMLs and guidelines.

Hope I got your doubt correct.

Abhishek

[William Brogden]

The term container is also used for servlet containers - in other words a compact set of code that can house and run servlets. I found this great summary of available servlet containers including some intended to be embedded in larger applications.

Bill

[Jessica James]

Hi Abhishek,

Thanks for your reply.. It is somewhat clear now..

Can I tell like that lightweight container means the container which can houses only small number of class files..

[Bear Bibeault]

Originally posted by Abhishek Asthana:
... coz SPRING is not a container

"coz" is not a word. Please only use real words such as "because" when posting to the Ranch.

[D Rog]

Lightweight means not requiring lot resources for executing and has a small foot print. Lightweight is all time sacrificing in support of certain functionality. For example many light weight web containers do not support EJBs. I am an author of some light weight container. My customers use it mostly on mobile devices as PDA, cell phone and so on.

[Abhishek Asthana]

Originally posted by Jessica James:
lightweight container means the container which can houses only small number of class files

Seems that you deduced this definition of lightweight containers from my layman definition of lightweight frameworks.

For a container, however your one-point criterion may be very insufficient. In my opinion, an embeddable container, like Jetty, which can be embedded in other application servers can be called lightweight. However as Rog said lightweight containers may lack some functionality may or may not be true. (Most web containers don't support EJBs anyway!) Hosting a small number of files could be one such limitation.
Resource requirement for execution is also a criterion for judgement in this matter.

Good that you raised this issue. 'Lightweight' is a heavy buzzword!!

Abhishek

[Jessica James]

Hi Abhishek and Rog,

Thanks a lot for your replies

I got your points..