Who is Using Tomcat or Jetty in Production?

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."

Comments

Re:My company uses tomcat exclusively

[Tet]

This sounds like a pefect job for Ant.

Hmmm. I don't like Ant. That's in no small part due to my belief that XML has no business being anywhere near a config file. You only have to look at Jabber to prove that. Or in fact, much of tomcat -- server.xml makes me feel sick every time I have to look at it. In fact Ant's very existence is a reaction to the problems Sun caused with Java when they decided to break the traditional source file to object file relationship that had existed for years. If they hadn't done that, and if javac worked like a traditional compiler, then make wouldn't have had such a hard time with Java in the first place, and Ant wouldn't have existed.

I am sure you can find a way to make Ant alter the config files then produce individual WAR files for each server.

Yes. I could do that with any number of means, and I'm sure Ant is one of them. However, it breaks one of the fundamental principles of software management -- the build you deploy on your production systems should come from the same distribution that you deployed on your test systems. Otherwise your tests are meaningless. You can exhaustively test a build all you want, but unless you're deploying the same build on production, what's the point?