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  5. Apache Tomcat vs GlassFish

Apache Tomcat vs GlassFish

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Stacks16.9K
Followers12.6K
Votes201
GitHub Stars8.0K
Forks5.3K
GlassFish
GlassFish
Stacks581
Followers112
Votes0

Apache Tomcat vs GlassFish: What are the differences?

Apache Tomcat vs GlassFish

Apache Tomcat and GlassFish are two popular Java-based web application servers that provide a platform for deploying and running Java web applications. While they are both used for similar purposes, there are key differences between the two.

  1. Servlet and JSP Support: Apache Tomcat is primarily designed as a servlet container and supports only the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies. In contrast, GlassFish is a full Java EE server and supports a wider range of Java EE technologies, including Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI), and Java Message Service (JMS).

  2. Scalability and Clustering: GlassFish offers superior scalability and clustering capabilities compared to Apache Tomcat. GlassFish supports high availability clustering, allowing multiple instances of the server to be deployed across multiple machines to handle increased traffic and provide failover.

  3. Administration and Monitoring: GlassFish provides a comprehensive administration console with a user-friendly web interface for managing and monitoring the server. The console allows for easy configuration of various server settings, monitoring of application performance, and the ability to deploy applications remotely. Apache Tomcat, on the other hand, requires manual configuration through XML files and lacks a dedicated administration console.

  4. Community and Support: Apache Tomcat has a vast and active community of developers and users, making it easy to find support, documentation, and extensions. GlassFish, while also having a community, is not as widespread as Apache Tomcat. This may affect the availability of third-party extensions and external support.

  5. Performance: Apache Tomcat is known for its lightweight nature and low memory footprint, making it ideal for small to medium-sized applications or instances with limited resources. GlassFish, being a full-featured Java EE server, requires more resources and may not be as efficient as Apache Tomcat in terms of performance.

  6. Compatibility and Standards: Apache Tomcat focuses on providing a simple and streamlined implementation of the Java Servlet and JSP Standards, ensuring compatibility with various Java web application frameworks. GlassFish, being a complete Java EE server, supports a broader set of standards and specifications, making it suitable for enterprise-level applications that require full Java EE compliance.

In summary, Apache Tomcat is lightweight, efficient, and ideal for small to medium-sized applications that primarily require servlet and JSP support. On the other hand, GlassFish is a robust Java EE server with superior scalability, administration tools, and support for a wider range of Java EE technologies, making it suitable for enterprise-level applications that require full Java EE compliance.

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Advice on Apache Tomcat, GlassFish

Hari
Hari

Mar 3, 2020

Needs advice

I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to

  1. configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly.
  2. Install apache and tomcat.
  3. Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server.
  4. Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports.
  5. Create users on RHEL for application support team.
  6. other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.

I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.

419k views419k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
GlassFish
GlassFish

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

An Application Server means, It can manage Java EE applications You should use GlassFish for Java EE enterprise applications. The need for a seperate Web server is mostly needed in a production environment.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
8.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
5.3K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
16.9K
Stacks
581
Followers
12.6K
Followers
112
Votes
201
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 79
    Easy
  • 72
    Java
  • 49
    Popular
  • 1
    Spring web
Cons
  • 3
    Blocking - each http request block a thread
  • 2
    Easy to set up
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Apache Tomcat, GlassFish?

NGINX

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Passenger

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

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