Apache Tomcat vs. IBM CICS Transaction Server

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.

Incentivized

IBM CICS Transaction Server is multi-decades proven transaction server which is very scalable, very secured, easy to use, has good transactional capabilities, works well all other mainframe resources such as Db2, languages on IBM mainframe, has access control capabilities in terms of who can access the transaction for read mode vs update mode, etc.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• De facto standard in the legacy enterprise
• Multiplatform connection
• Native connection with DB2

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Would like to see the transaction response matrix on the average transaction response among all requests.
• Would like to see GUI tool to be able to see currently running transactions
• Would like to be able to get the details of where the cics transaction was triggered from

Incentivized

We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

There is no comparison, in practice, the possibility of using the latest programming languages but, above all, the databases can be different and more modern than DL1.

Incentivized

It's very easy to add instances to an existing deployment and, using apache with mod proxy balancer, to scale up the serving farm

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to use our decades old code and still continue to support the business
• Allows us to have faster time to market and modernize our systems
• We can still continue to use our legacy resources for modern systems

Incentivized