By having a similar purpose, which is to publish and manage access to services, sites, and/or web systems, I have had to implement them to analyze their qualities and virtues, but stability, the power of implementation of different solutions and to be able to expand through own …
To be quite honest I often select Apache because it is the world's most commonly used web server and I have been using it for more than 20 years across many organizations. I have never been burned using Apache. Apache rises above IIS in functionality, configurability, and the …
Apache is far superior to Microsoft's IIS. The only reason to consider IIS would be for compatibility with a given software package that is made exclusively for IIS.
I've used Microsoft's IIS and IBM's HTTP server. The major and a clear advantage of Apache web server over these products is that it’s free and has no licensing issues. Being in the industry for quite sometime (oldest web server) a lot of products and customizations have been …
Apache Tomcat is a much wider open standard than Microsoft IIS. It also seems to use fewer resources and is simpler to maintain. Troubleshooting when an issue arises is difficult. We had trouble managing the Tail logs when something strange happened. Logging is very complex and …
Well WebLogic is very complex. Most of what happens with WebLogic requires servers to be restarted, which isn't always possible. Also, Oracle tries to force you to only use their GUI interface for most of the administration, which could be done directly in the files, but are …
It's clear that JBoss is a full JEE stack implementation while Tomcat isn't, but if you don't need the whole JEE stack there are many lightweight alternatives that implement the required feature with Tomcat.
As I mentioned earlier, the Apache HTTP Server has a small disadvantage compared to the competition (NGINX) in terms of performance. If you run websites that really have a lot of visitors, NGINX might be the better alternative.
On the other hand, the Apache HTTP Server is open source and free. Further functionalities can be activated via modules. The documentation is really excellent.
Excellent value for companies wishing to host Java applications in the cloud. Utilizing hosting tools such as load balancers and network and application firewalls, Tomcat can be part of a powerful system to host web applications to thousands of users. There has been consistency in the development and support of Tomcat since its initial release in the late '90s and the best commonalities have been carried forward. If you host Java web applications, Tomcat is as good as any for an application server.
Windows Server and Active Directory is very robust and stable, it has been a staple in every IT environment I have worked in during my career. Junior to Intermediate admins can learn Windows Server easily, the user interfaces make administration tasks very easy as well as the documentation available through a vast amount of resources. There are other Operating Systems available with no GUI which has a smaller attack surface, faster update installation and reboot time. Windows Server does have the ability to remove the desktop experience, however it is not something I have had experience with and I believe most administrators choose not to remove it.
Street Cred: Apache Web Server is the Founder for all of Apache Foundation's other projects. Without the Web Server, Apache Foundation would look very different. That being said, they have done a good job of maintaining the code base, and keeping a lot of what makes Apache so special
Stability: Apache is rock-solid. While no software is perfect, Apache can parse your web sources quickly and cleanly.
Flexibility: Need to startup your own Webpage? Done. Wordpress? Yup. REST Endpoint? Check. Honeypot? Absolutely.
The default configurations which comes with Apache server needs to get optimized for performance and security with every new installation as these defaults are not recommended to push on the production environment directly.
Security options and advanced configurations are not easy to set up and require an additional level of expertise.
Admin frontend GUI could be improved to a great extent to match with other enterprise tools available to serve similar requirements.
Using tomcat manager to troubleshoot is not very informative. Error messages are vague, you have to dig into log files for more information about the problems.
Is great for simple web applications, but may not work for heavy development which may require a full J2EE stack, might like JBoss better.
Security in tomcat is not straightforward, as I discovered that you have to understand how to set up realms in tomcat in order to hash passwords, which I was not overly familiar with, which is a big deal when setting up users in the tomcat-users.xml file.
Microsoft needs to minimize the update frequency by making the product more secure. It can become very exhausting trying to keep updated if you don't have a dedicated support team. It can become challenging where the business is unable to allow downtime for reboots as part of the update process.
Prone to security and audit vulnerabilities.
The operating system needs more CPU and memory resources compared to other options such as Linux.
Understanding the licensing model can be abit confusing.
Comes with a standard firewall, but not the most secured one available. Would suggest using a more secured firewall as part of your antivirus software.
Due to the number of vulnerabilities and the operating system being a target for hackers, anti-virus software is a must.
I've carefully reviewed the servers and services currently running on Windows Server 2012, and given the opportunity would renew them as is going forward. There are two systems I currently have in place, one is a very large Linux implementation for a large ecommerce site, and one is a very large backup solution front ended by FTP servers running Linux. Neither are well suited for Windows, but the overall network infrastructure is and will be Windows Server for the foreseeable future.
Tomcat has a very rich API set which allows us to implement our automation script to trigger the deployment, configure, stop and start Tomcat from the command line. In our projects, we embedded Tomcat in our Eclipse in all of the developer's machines so they could quickly verify their code with little effort, Azure Webapp has strong support for Tomcat so we could move our application to Azure cloud very easy. One drawback is Tomcat UI quite poorly features but we almost do not use it.
Anyone new to IT could easily use the familiar Desktop Experience (GUI) version because we all know how to use Windows, whether a client or server version. Once an IT user is more comfortable with the operating system, they can move on to the Core version, which is the way to go in almost all situations.
Tomcat doesn't have a built-in watchdog that ensures restart upon failure, so you have to provide it externally. A very good solution is java service wrapper. The community edition is able to restart Tomcat upon out of memories exceptions.
Tomcat support to customize memory used and allow us to define the Connection pool and thread pool to increase system performance and availability, Tomcat server itself consume very little memory and almost no footprint. We use Tomcat in our production environment which has up to thousands of concurrent users and it is stable and provides a quick response.
I give this rating because there is so much Apache documentation and information on the web that you can literally do anything. This has to do with the fact that there is a huge Open Source community that is beyond mature and perhaps one of the most helpful to be found. The only thing that should hold anyone back from anything is that they can not read. RTFM, my friend. And I must say that the manual is excellent.
Microsoft's support is hugely wide-ranging from articles online to having to contact them directly for the more serious issues. In recent years when I have contacted them directly, I have found the support o be excellent as I have found myself connected to very knowledgeable people in the field in which I needed the support. The online support available is vast and I tend to find most of the time that there is always someone out there who has had the same issue as me in the past and knows something about how to resolve it! This is the advantage of using industry standard and long-established systems such as Windows Server.
Make sure that you have detailed processes in place for every server instance you plan to install/upgrade, if possible get the base OS loaded and Windows Updates applied ahead of time, and if using a VM take a snapshot prior to installing each role, as well as along the way.
I has a lot more features, except that IIS is more integrated in a Windows environment. But now with .net core also possible from Apache it would work anywhere really. Only in a full Windows environment where full integration is needed I would chose to go for IIS. Otherwise Apache it is.
Eclipse Jetty is the best alternative for Apache Tomcat because which is also an open-source and lightweight servlet container like Tomcat. A major advantage of this over Tomcat is that Jetty server can easily be embedded with the source code of web applications. Since it requires less memory to operate, you may realize that it is very efficient.
They are different experiences, and while the other solutions offer enterprise-grade stability and, in some cases, address Windows server shortcomings (such as patching), they all do the trick, but the other solutions require a deeper technical background/configuration of items at the command line, which some people are not fully comfortable with.
Tomcat is cheap and very quick to deploy, so it has benefited much when situation needs applications to be deployed quickly without wasting time on licensing and installations.
Plenty of documentation available so no vendor training is required. Support contract is not needed as well.
