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Who is Using Tomcat or Jetty in Production?

Posted by Cliff on from the open-source-gains=ground dept.

JettyCatReady queries: "Ok, my company (a rather large, global financial institution) has recently blessed Linux for production use (woohoo!). Their position is that it will save them hardware costs to run on Intel machines instead of big IBM or Sun iron. No mention at all has been made of their position on open source. I'm part of a team that wants to make the case that the real savings are to be made by making use of things like Tomcat in place of BEA where we can (if all we want is JSP why pay a huge cost per server?). I even have a boss's boss who said in front of me, 'So I'm thinking, am I missing something by not using Tomcat? Do I have anything to lose?'"

"These are all excellent signs. The next step is to get an open source server into production. Tomcat is the natural choice because it's got the name recognition among Java app servers. Here's where I'm a little stumped. Whenever I mention the words 'Tomcat' and 'production' together, performance junkies come out of the woodwork and tell me that Tomcat sucks for production (what with it being a reference implementation and not optimized for speed). They say use Jetty (except for the ones that say to use Resin). The counter argument is that if my managers have heard of Tomcat, and seen vendors that will support Tomcat, and have never heard of Jetty, then there's no way they're going to bless it over Tomcat. (The same boss who praised Tomcat above also made a face when I mentioned JBoss. And I'm sure it has nothing to do with his personal experience with either.)

My question is, does anybody have some real world numbers of large institutions actually using these servers in a production environment? If somebody can tell me 'Company X uses Tomcat exclusively' then we would have no problem contacting company X and saying, 'So, what have your experiences been?' In other words I need leads, not actual white papers (although those would be nice, too). I need some real experiences, not just people who like Jetty over Tomcat because they don't like Sun."

6 of 477 comments (clear)

  1. Novell by Scutter · · Score: 5, Informative

    Novell's Groupwise version 6 runs on Tomcat with Apache. It's actually set up to run on Netware, of course, but I've gotten it running quite nicely on linux as well.

    --

    "Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
  2. JBoss ! by FullClip · · Score: 5, Informative

    JBoss is an excellent fullfledged J2EE application server.

    They even offer consultancy if you cannot get it right the first time.
    Excellent award winning server, excellent support, what do you need more ?

    It has Jetty integrated and gives you the full J2EE stack.
    You can get it to work with Tomcat too: no problem.

    Check it out, the design is awesome for the techies.
    The support option is great for the management.
    Everyone's happy :)

  3. Re:Tomcat is bad but alternatives are even worse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Having said that, Tomcat on the back end means Apache on the web tier

    Why? Tomcat can be used stand-alone and it can be integrated with other webservers, even IIS!

  4. weather.com is now exclusively Tomcat by nevermind · · Score: 5, Informative

    We have migrated to Linux, Apache, and Tomcat over the last year-and-a-half. We use it both in development and in production, across 100 or so boxes. As with everything, there are issues, but for the most part we are very happy. Even most commercial vendor's idea of a "big" site doesn't come close to what we do, so we have found very little difference between problem solving in the open-source and closed-source worlds.

    For what we do, you can't beat the price... And yes, that includes the price of our time.

  5. Re:BEA is buggy as hell anyhow..... by JThaddeus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Amen! I have been forced to run BEA and it has been agony. Plenty of things that run under Tomcat won't under WebLogic. IMHO, this just plain wrong! Afterall, isn't Tomcat the *reference* implementation? Examples:

    6.0SP2 would not honor VariableInfo.NESTED in custom tag libraries

    6.1 requires the weblogic.xml file in your WAR. Huh? Why in the WAR?

    6.1 will hang for 30 seconds on your servlets if you open and close the stream without sending anything on the stream

    6.1SP2 to set the proper application CLASSPATH

    6.1SP3 fails to handle code that translates a SAX2 event stream to HTML using Xerces (SAX2) and Xalan (XSL); I'm dead in the water with this because our application depends on SAX2 streams

    Honestly, I think I have spent more time tryiing to make WebLogic work than it took to write the application in the first place!

    --
    "Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
  6. Complementary by Martin+Spamer · · Score: 5, Informative


    There seems to be a lot of confusion about what Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss and J2ee App-Servers. They are not really competative but complementary products. A Java AppServer is composed of [at least] three main components. The HTTP deamon, a Servlet/JSP container and a EJB Container.

    Jetty is a primarily HTTP deamon, it is designed to handle HTTP request in a scalable manner.

    Tomcat is a Servlet/JSP container, it implements the Servlet API it provides limited HTTP handling and no EJB support. Tomcat is highly reliable more so than most commercial 'industrial strength' App Servers. On the performance side; the Tomcat 3.x architecture is not hot but is adequate for many applications, all but the heaviest loads. Tomcat 4.x is significant better in this regard, because it includes an enhanced HTTP deamon.

    JBoss is an EJB container which uses Tomcat 4.0 as it's HTTP deamon and Servlet container.