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.
If the environment has many different protocols for data exchange between partners and most of the protocols follow some standards like EDI X12, TIBCO BusinessConnect should be a good tool to take care this business use case. If the environment has a few simple protocols for data exchange, e.g. SFTP, FTPS or emails, some lighter weight tools will be enough and TIBCO BusinessConnect may be an overkill tool.
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.
When a new version is released, its better to test it thoroughly before letting customers apply the release in their real time environment. There were missing functionalities from the previous versions which were not identified ahead of time.
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.
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.
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.
The main reason TIBCO BusinessConnect was selected is because of the overall solution it provides with the different TIBCO products. Since TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service are already in place and the canonical model is already built and integrated into the Information Bus, TIBCO BusinessConnect is the best tool to work with them.
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.
