For years now I've been saying that J2EE may be dead (or dying).  Wherever possible, people are trying to cut down on code and configuration.  The lighter the better.  These days, even Tomcat seems heavy for the light-weight services we want to deploy.  Enter DropWizard.

Thanks goes to Coda Hale for putting together DropWizard, a rock-solid lightweight REST stack.  Its got everything you could want: configuration, metrics, parsing, health checks, etc.  It can even serve up static content.

With all those features, who needs war files?

Recently we contributed to DropWizard, adding the ability to serve up static content from the root url, which allowed us to port Virgil over.  Since Virgil has an entirely ExtJS based UI, static content is all we needed for the UI.

We just released a new version Virgil with DropWizard under the covers.

Using DropWizard, Virgil now provides an Admin UI.  Additionally, there are additional configuration parameters for logging and the http server.

If you get a chance, take a look at DropWizard.   It might just have you replacing your old servlet container. 

From http://brianoneill.blogspot.com/2012/01/virgil-goes-dropwizard-who-needs-war.html