For compiling i always use jikes, which is probably also installed. It is 10-20x faster than the regular javac.
IBM usually also has the best JVM, but it usually lags behind the reference implementation by about a year. If you want to play with the latest stuff in the 1.4beta, you'll have to use the Sun imp. If 1.3.0 is ok, get the newest IBM one. If you're just doing some experimentation and light hosting, it doesn't really matter which JVM you use. If your appserver starts to crash in really nasty ways, switch to a different one. Tomcat or your own code is much more likely to slow you down than the particular JVM. Some other notes: what i usually do is put my JDKs in /usr/local, something like /usr/local/IBMJDK1.3.0re4 and /usr/local/jdk1.3.2 or something, then create a symbolic link /usr/java -> /usr/local/IBM... that way, it's really easy to switch out JVM's, you can just switch the link around. Some tools like ant and maybe tomcat also expect you to have a $JAVA_HOME environment variable, so set that to /usr/java also. I haven't tried the latest 4x versions of tomcat, but i found it to be a huge pain in the butt when i used the 3.1, 3.2 releases. I've always found Orion to be much easier to develop with, as well as being really fast and stable. http://www.orionserver.com according to sach, resin is really easy to set up too http://www.caucho.com -Lkb On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Phil Suh wrote: > > > http://www.nostatic.org/grip/ has grip in src and rpm and links to the > > dependencies. > > John--thanks for the pointer to grip. > > Mandrake had the latest grip already installed. > > On to my next question: which version of Java for Linux do you recommend? > I'll be doing lots of tomcat/cocoon work. IBM? Sun's? Blackdown? > > Thanks, Phil > >
