Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review It's pretty good at creating an extract of a whole table, but not the best at grabbing all related tables in my experience. Pretty intuitive on setting up your test data categories. I also really like that it can either run via ISPF or via Topaz which was included with our purchase.
Read full review Pros Fast to start up, which is useful when we need to just check that our changes are working correctly. Free, which allows us to not be involved with the finance/legal team about using it. Bundled with Spring Boot, which makes it even more convenient for our testing. Read full review Extract/load data from one DB or table to another masking the data for testing. Compare extracts against each other to ensure good baselines. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review I find it more obtuse to use than IBM Optim. Related tables are difficult to incorporate. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating Well, in actuality, I have never needed support for Apache Tomcat since it is configured and ready-to-go with no configuration needed on my end.
Read full review Support has been amazing compared to
Optim . Further, new features are very regular with File-AID - I can't remember the last time
Optim had a significant update. File-AID support is very receptive to feature requests and reported bugs, including sending out hotfixes quickly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Optim is more user friendly in how it operates, in my opinion. It's less obtuse to figure out how to extract and mask the data required compared to File-AID. Further,
Optim is easier to gather related tables, by far. I do prefer using File-AID via the Topaz GUI much more than using
Optim via its GUI. Finally, I personally believe that File-AID is significantly faster to run than
Optim - this could be a configuration issue.
Read full review Scalability It's very easy to add instances to an existing deployment and, using apache with mod proxy balancer, to scale up the serving farm
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Saves time creating production like data for testing. Keeps that data safe from developers and need-to-know only. Read full review ScreenShots