Using Babl

Development Mode

Babl will start in high-performance mode by default, but this can use significant system resources. For development purposes, use the config properties, or a system property to set babl.performance.mode=DEVELOPMENT.

This will cause the server to run in a single thread using a conservative idle strategy.

Library

Babl is available on Maven Central. Used as a project dependency, the server can be launched like so:

private static void launchBabl()
{
    BablServer.main(new String[] {"/path/to/config.properties"});
}

Or programmatically:

private void launchBabl()
{
    final BablConfig config = PropertiesLoader
        .configure(Paths.get("/path/to/config.properties"));
    config.applicationConfig().application(new MyApplication());
    try (SessionContainers containers = BablServer.launch(config))
    {
        containers.start();
        new ShutdownSignalBarrier().await();
    }
}

Docker

Babl is packaged in a docker container for ease of deployment. The base container is tagged as babl:0.10.0, and should be extended with your own container definition:

FROM babl:0.10.0

COPY my-app/build/lib/ /babl/lib/
COPY my-app/build/config/my-app.properties /babl/config
ENV BABL_CONFIG_FILE="/babl/config/my-app.properties"
ENV JVM_RUNTIME_PARAMETERS="-Dbabl.debug.enabled=true"

The project source code contains an example docker-compose file. This can be used to connect a simple echo application, with HTML resources hosted by an nginx instance.

Standalone

Babl can also be used in a standalone manner. Simply build the project, and use the -all variant of the JAR from the build/dist directory:

$ java -jar /path/to/babl-all-0.10.0.jar /path/to/config.properties

Note that there is no legacy HTTP server functionality, so any HTML resources will need to be hosted using a suitable technology. See the Docker Compose example.

For more information on configuration, see Configuration.