Lars Andersen from Rimfaxe wrote me back in regard to my comments about Rimfaxe Web Server. I am posting his comments here as they provide some good usefull info about a very promissing project:

my question:

My main questions are about the WEB-INF/rws/jars and the WEB-INF/lib directories. I am assuming from my experiments that jars in WEB-INF/lib get ignored for now. If so what is the purpose of the WEB-INF/rws/jars directory. I would have guessed that that would be for .so’s of the compiled jars.

his reply:

‘WEB-INF/classes’ and ‘WEB-INF/lib’ is ignored for now, but it is my
intention that the classic mode operation should use these, as an ordinary servlet container would. Classic mode is available as an option in the configuration file, but is very experimental, and will ignore jars. (For a reason, as will become clear)

‘WEB-INF/rws/jars’ is for jars to be included in the web-app. The idea
is to compile them into libservlets.so alog with the content of ‘WEB-INF/rws/src’. Alas, GCC 3.3.x has a flaw, GCJ will compile the jar, but it ignores resource files, which is crucial to the workings of a great many jars out there. So I’m holding back this part until GCC 3.4 is released with the bug fixed. (and it does work in the GCC3.4 cvs checkout)

Another issue is that GCJ is not that mature yet. Only a few libraries
compile without some tweaking. On www.rimfaxe.com you can find Makefiles
for Gnu JAXP, and JDBC drivers. If you have any specific requests, I’ll be happy to help you out and provide hints. These precompiled .so libraries should go in the ‘/shared’ dir, as you correctly has written.

Thanks Lars! So it looks like once gcc 3.4 comes out we will have a kick ass new platform for j2ee. In the meantime as I said before, it can still be used for specific simpler applications where high availability is of optimum concern.