U just developed a great mashup, where wld u rather deploy it to? While I fink plenty of shops in Nigeria are so use to Jboss, I fink Glassfish has been kicking its arse and leading the way in recent times wen u look at rate of adoption and blogoshpere. Even Marc Fleury wld attest to that! Not surprising as Sun has bin throwing resources at it in its bid to gain some market share. Sun seems to be getting some tngs rite these dayz. I must comment that I never rily liked JBoss, my tomcat was just the ideal tng for mi. Perhaps my major gripe with JBoss was its poor documentation. U could throw a stronger machine at it, but, I subscribe to tuning. Fine, I understand open source developers also need to feed their families. I have played around Glassfishv2 and seriously believe it’s better compared to JBoss or Apache Geronimo. It feels performant, startup time is ok and easier to use. The admin interface aint bad at all. Not too many hosting sites have Glassfish offerings, but I fink tngs are beginning to change. Not sure if licensing has been an issue. The Sun rise has a lot to do with this, though it’s not yet reflecting in their books.

I would go with tomcat any day. Just like my tngs simple! Which server do u swear by: Jetty, JonAS, JBoss, Geronimo, Resin, Tomcat or wat?
Share ur thots on which App/Web server is your ideal platform and why.

I am not too much of an experienced Java Server Programmer. But when it comes to JSP, and designing Servlets, Apache Tomcat is always definitely my first choice. Even after installing Netbeans 6.1, I still use Tomcat 6.o instead of the GlassFish that comes with it.

Finally i would love to pay credits to Sun (Netbeans 6.1) and Apache(Tomcat,apache2triad) for their great opensource accessibilty.

since u didn't specify "open-source" i would say websphere.

for open-source, i really don't have much experience with many open-source app servers but i would go with jboss. it's been around 4 a while and well tested. these days i usually use liferay tho.

I love simple things. Tomcat is simple and well documented. Thats the only Servlets/JSP container i have used. I don't know what effect ot would have on me for sticking to just one container when there are lots,

tomcat is not a app server in the real sense. u used the right word to describe it - servlet container. it's a reference implementation on which several app servers are based. it is not suitable for deployment of live applications, rather only for testing purposes.

wat of hosting companies that have it. All my works have been on Tomcat ooo and they are working well. Tell me about the difference with other engines, wud lov to know

what is the volume of traffic to those apps u have deployed on tomcat? i already told u the difference. tomcat is a reference implementation of a servlet container. many app servers actually embed tomcat with some little tweaking. others develop their engines which can then be compared with tomcat for benchmarking.

k, i get u now. the traffic to a site also determines the type of container to use right, ? What features are in these 'higher' containers that need to be used by the the developer thate are not in tomcat for example i make direct JDBC calls, ? would it be different on those other ones, --- _{sorry if i m buggin with ?}

Correct! tomcat is a servlet/JSP container. It's the official reference implementation for Servlets and JSP technology.  Being that, anything that works in tomcat is supposed to work in other web servers. That has definitely made it very popular. It's not a fully webserver, say like Websphere or weblogic,  being that it does not support EJB for example.

@javalove

tomcat is not robust enough since it was developed simply as a reference implementation. therefore it was not expected to be able to handle high-volume web applications for example where performance is critical. but there are several app servers based on tomcat though including jonas and geronimo (if i'm not mistaken). it fits better in the web-server category. it can also be argued that since it has no EJB container of its own, it isn't an app server (j2ee spec - client layer|web layer + ejb layer|server layer)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tomcat

Wrong Tomcat is actually a very robust platform .

If you are not developing EJBs (i wonder who does that this days) you are better off with a very simple servlet container like tomcat.

candylips:

If you are not developing EJBs (i wonder who does that this days) you are better off with a very simple servlet container like tomcat.

A lot of people are doing that sir, companies rely on EJB sir, and I wonder what kind of Java Server Side one does without EJB , just kidding

I've stuck my guns with Java App Server, but I am begining to look at glassfish(I dont av a choice really) because I am building SIP Servlets and the best java app server for SIP is sailfin and sailfin is built on glassfish

Glassfish----Java App Server---Websphere----Tomcat------Just get the work done and make your customer happy

my 2 cents

ciao

Trust me people do not do much EJBs this days.

Developers are now relying more on light weigth frameworks to get the job done. I have used Jboss, Websphere(a nightmare to work with IMO) and Glassfish in previous projects and nothing still beats the simplicity of using a Simple servlet container like Tomcat.
In fact in one of our recent projects we even embedded Jetty (a less than 2mg jar file ) into our app and we were still able to provide enterprise services like JMS , transaction management ,etc via plugins

We shouldn't be comparing Jboss and Tomcat, its like saying which is sweeter honey or sugar ?

Really, they serve different purposes ,

Yeah Glassfish has all the hype about it these days, its 'cause sun is playing better in the open source community.

Hence, you have SIP servers etc. using it

The Jboss interface we're mostly used to is the community variant, try paying some money to Red Hat , then you'd see a different Admin console.

In my opinion Jboss is still as great as ever! (Webshere is cool too)

@candylips

it will be nice if you provide a list of those mission critical apps.

& WAS is a nightmare? LOL. OK.

Of course hardly do ppl use EJBs these days. Matter of fact the only project whicn involved EJBs in my recent experience was in late 2003 with IBM. b4 and after i have had no involvement with EJBs. But EJBs still remain central to the J2EE architecture. an app server is not complete if it doesn't provide the option of using EJBs. the real kicker here is in all my experience even with little EJB involvement (rather hibernate and a whole bunch of other ORM frameworks), none of them used tomcat. they all used WAS or WPS.

It is a myth that mission critical apps cannot run in tomcat. What you might not get is the rich app console that comes with most major appservers. I have seen tomcat combined with apache web server for a high transactional webstore (one major issue however was clusturing ) and it stood up.

Of all the app servers i have worked with Jboss is my favorite(am still playing around with Glassfish though and it looks pretty decent).

As for WAS. I have had a lot of flak getting the dam Clusturing to work across 2 JVMs . something which was a breeze with Jboss. And little things like its JNDI naming scheme which is different from the reference implementation just drives me nuts

@Bossman
Tomcat as far as i know is a web server and not often referred to as an App Server as it doesn't support the whole J2ee stack.


@logica
Tomcat being a reference implementation has nothng to do being robust. To the best of my knowledge Tomcat owns about 55% of Java server market, its no surprise SpringSource choose Tomcat for its platform. Tomcat is actually being embed in Jboss default App server

if u glean around the internet for commentaries on WebSphere , i fink it's a very buggy piece of software. Oracle's BEA Weblogic seems to be the most robust of all the App servers(open source / proprietary) around

@Ghenghis
I dont have to pay Sun to get the out of box experience i get with Glassfish.


@candylips
Rily i fink jetty is anoda lovely piece of software with its embed facility,comet support etc

But Caucho's Resin commercial offering seem to be more robust compared to Tomcat

"tomcat combined with apache web server for a high transactional webstore"

i really don't need to add anything given the quote above, of which i boldened the important phrase.

tomcat will be useful as i said when you're not dealing with huge volume. of course i refer to tomcat stand-alone, after all several of the other app servers are based on tomcat in one form or the other (i.e customized/tweaked versions).

matter of fact i did use tomcat last in 2004 for a project in a university community. but then, remember the user-base is in the region of double digit thousands, therefore the hit rate is pretty low (probably fewer than 10,000/day).

Well the only thing that i think Apache brings to the table is maybe clusturing and load balancing which is now available in Tomcat 5.5 and above

I still think tomcat can do pretty well alone in a highly demanding enviroment but i don't really have facts to back this up because i have seen it used most times in combination with apache webserver.

, of course tomcat simply serves as a servlet container for AWS. it will not be very wise to use tomcat as the main web server for high-volume websites/webapps.