Apache Tomcat vs. SAP NetWeaver BPM

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

It is well suited when we need to integrate business processes with SAP ERP and SAP CRM - the solution can be integrated with business rules/procedures defined in SAP ERP/CRM and NetWeaver can be used to monitor the rules and flag off exceptions. When there are multiple workflows running, it tends to slow down running of these processes. Also, it entirely depends on SAP portal for it to run efficiently.

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

• Virtual paper trail. Iterations of process and current documentation are all stored as "artifacts", leaving a great trail.
• Configuration of users. BPM somewhat magically determines which users will be impacted and automates rules.
• A pro (that is also a con) is the design interface. If you know what you are doing, it is incredibly powerful and malleable.

• 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

• Live readings would be nice.
• Easier to maneuver
• Work with all systems with the press of one keystroke

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

As a big fan of SAP in general, the BPM solution fits right in with all the other things SAP does well, and does it with incredible efficiency

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

We have our own tech support for systems, I would say they probably could use more training on it, I don't really think it's anything regarding the SAP system, but more the knowledge they have on the system itself. It seems to take longer for them to fix any issues we may come across.

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

I found the initial setup of NetWeaver is much simpler than other products especially in an SAP environment where we have SAP ERP/HRM/CRM as it can be well integrated with other SAP products. The only drawback is the need/dependency on SAP Portal. It is better suited in an environment where SAP ERP is running.

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

• Helped us harness integrated benefit from having SAP ERP/CRM by leveraging NetWeaver to define business processes/rules and monitor exceptions
• Did not have any negative experience except for the fact that at times when multiple rules run, it can be somewhat slow

Incentivized