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.
We use it for every linux service we need to have running. It really works great and is easily manageable with the SUSE Manager, which helps a lot with the updating process. Although it is not stressfull on the CMD itself, it really does simplify things. Besides that, we are really happy with working with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
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.
The support window for service packs after a new SP is released is too short.
Community engagement is low.
There are times when supported packages fall too far behind and create compatibility issues with applications. The Open Build Service usually provides a way around this, though.
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.
We've been using this OS for about 8 years in a productive environment. During this time, we have never run into any problems that stopped or impacted our production environment. We have been able to solve any problem we ran into using either common sense, suse documentation or suse support.
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.
Support personnel are helpful and fairly fast to bring resolution to non-emergency issues. Patches are created and posted in a timely fashion. We so far have not had any major problems that needed support
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.
We went straight to SLES when we initially started migrating oracle to hana since at that time, HANA came on a pre-installed server that had to be purchased from an official vendor, and SLES was the only allowed OS. We stuck with SLES after we became certified to do our own installations because so far, SLES was a good fit for us.
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.
