Why the Liberty Profile is like the Millenium Falcon!!!

First of all, the Liberty profile can start in under 12 parsecs! (yes, yes, yes, that's a measure of distance, but what Han says goes, OK!  Besides, he shot first ;o) )

I was stunned to see this video of the millennium falcon and how it took 3 years to animate, brick by brick. Absolutely amazing job by Francisco Prieto.


Lego Millennium Falcon Stop Motion Assembly 3d from Francisco Prieto on Vimeo.

The chap who worked on the Lego Millennium Falcon build, Francisco Prieto, is clearly an uber determined person, with dedication and attention to detail plainly on show.  I've been a privileged developer in my time at IBM, having worked with some equally dedicated, determined and smart folks in the Hursley lab.  None more so than the team who have created the Liberty profile for WebSphere, a truly awesome lightweight, componentised developer focused offering that I'm proud to say I'm working on.

The new lightweight OSGi kernel it sits on provides the base for the liberty profile to enable all the words which people like to hear, such as consumable :o)  Basically, using OSGi you're able to create your server runtime to be bespoke to your application requirements.  If it doesn't use a particular aspect, such as JSPs, why load it into the runtime?  This is the componentised aspect similar to the lego build above which allows you to construct your finished server, as you want with componentised building bricks.

So what are we talking about here when we say lightweight and fast?  On my macbook pro, here are the stats:

Download size:   26MB  (Yep, that's twenty-six Meg!)
Size on disk:  31.2MB
Memory footprint:   70.9MB
Start up time: 1-2 seconds
Total download, install and start time:  < 3.5 minutes (that's 210 seconds!)

For proof it only takes 210 seconds to fully install the tools, runtime, create and start a new server, check out this non stop video:



I hope you're impressed with the changes that have been made to the WebSphere offering!  Don't forget to check out our new WASdev community (www.wasdev.net) around Liberty, and join in to let us know what you think.  You can download the Beta now and have a play. For more info, check out our education pages.