Servlets, JSPs, and RSS, oh my!

I've been dabbling in a lot of stuff lately... I installed WSAD on the old laptop, along with a DB2 Express and I've been playing with Servlets and JSPs. I don't plan to get into web based apps, which is what it seems that everyone and their brother is doing with the technology. I am interested in using the Websphere infrastructure for a generic app server using HTTP as the communication protocol.

Why is this something to explore? Well, you get database connection pooling, concurrency and multi-threading support, failover and load balancing. In short a ton of characteristics needed for a full blown app server. What a waste to only use it for generating HTML. So right now I drive the servlets with a java client which sends the data with an HTTP POST.

First impressions of Websphere - a ton of things that are configurable. Lots of knobs to turn and tweak. I am trying to take it step by step. Of course I haven't used any competitors other than Tomcat, but I am not sure that I would call Tomcat a competitor.

Lastly, took some time into setting up a RSS aggregator - I decided on Bloglines since it is web based and pretty popular. Of course you can feed off my blog from http://technomusings.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I will have to figure out how to put a RSS button on the web page later.