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Tomcat has proven to be a versatile and reliable choice for hosting web applications and services across various industries. Its …
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What is Apache Tomcat?
Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.
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- Installation (24)9.999%
- Security management (24)8.787%
- Administration and management (24)8.484%
- Application server performance (24)8.282%
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What is Apache Tomcat?
Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.
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What is Apache Tomcat?
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Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.
Reviewers rate Installation highest, with a score of 9.9.
The most common users of Apache Tomcat are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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Tomcat has proven to be a versatile and reliable choice for hosting web applications and services across various industries. Its lightweight nature and stability make it suitable for small to middle-sized applications, while also offering excellent scalability. Users have found Tomcat to be a low-cost solution that requires minimal maintenance, making it an attractive option for organizations looking to streamline their application hosting. Tomcat's popularity within the development community has also made it a preferred choice for quick proof-of-concept projects and marketing content development. Additionally, Tomcat is highly regarded for its ability to handle modern security demands, serving as an SSL encrypted web server for hosting sensitive systems such as attendance and billing systems in non-profit private schools. Overall, Tomcat's wide adoption and solid track record make it a reliable choice for developers seeking a robust servlet container for their web-based applications.
Quick and Convenient Deployment: Many users have found the deployment process of Spring Boot applications using Tomcat to be quick and convenient. They appreciate how easy it is to set up Tomcat, with its straightforward installation process and compatibility with popular IDEs like Eclipse. This convenience allows developers to get started quickly and efficiently. Stability and Robustness: Reviewers frequently highlight that Tomcat is a lightweight Java servlet container with a minimal memory footprint, making it efficient for running web applications without consuming excessive resources. Users praise Tomcat for its stability and robustness, requiring minimal maintenance and ensuring a stable and reliable application server environment. This reliability instills confidence in users regarding its performance. Extensive Documentation: Users appreciate the availability of extensive documentation for Tomcat, making it easy to find solutions and troubleshoot any issues. The comprehensive documentation not only helps users understand the features of Tomcat but also provides guidance on how to configure and optimize their deployments. Having access to detailed documentation enhances the overall user experience by reducing time spent on problem-solving.
These three pros - Quick and Convenient Deployment, Stability and Robustness, Extensive Documentation - were commonly mentioned by reviewers when discussing their positive experiences with Tomcat.
Limited User Interface: Reviewers have expressed that the user interface of Tomcat is limited and basic, lacking advanced features and functionality. Some users felt that an improvement in the user interface would greatly enhance their experience with the software.
Difficult Troubleshooting: Several reviewers have mentioned that troubleshooting in Tomcat can be challenging at times. Users found error messages to be vague and not very informative, often requiring them to dig into log files for more detailed information about problems.
Complex Configuration: Many users have stated that configuring Tomcat can be difficult, particularly when it comes to setting up security and understanding how to set up realms for password hashing. Some reviewers also suggested that configuration could be made easier by using JSON instead of XML.
Users of Apache Tomcat commonly recommend the following:
Consider Apache Tomcat for Java web applications, especially for quick and easy deployments. Users find it easy to use and lightweight, making it suitable for small to mid-size web server solutions.
Try Apache Tomcat as a free and reliable server option. It performs well and has a large community, offering support for newbies and providing a user-friendly experience.
For better performance on Windows, users suggest trying the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) runtime with Apache Tomcat. This combination can enhance the server's speed and efficiency.
Overall, users recommend Apache Tomcat for its simplicity, elegance, and usefulness in various projects. It is especially recommended for less complex applications that require faster application loading on restart and adds valuable support to Apache's HTTPD Server for Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages.
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December 12, 2023
Apache Tomcat: Amazing application server
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have used it for many years..it is our first web server to deploy and test our application.Simple to use and configure.it is open source and it is use to deploy java based applications.
- Web application server
- Deployment of web application
- Provide security to our application
- Sometime it crashed so we need to restart the server
May 20, 2023
As a sysadmin, Tomcat is a pleasure to manage.
We use Apache Tomcat to serve Java applications to our end users. These are main line-of-business applications, aimed both at staff and students, from a major vendor. Their uptime and performance are important to us, and Tomcat is key to delivering them.
- performance
- reliability
- management
- logging
October 09, 2022
Best web application server
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Apache Tomcat is great tool for the deployment of the application. Its the web server in short called as WAS. We deploy lot application with help of Kubernetes which creates the container and the application will be running in the Apache Tomcat server. It is very light weight application which is very easy to install and remove .
- Web application
- Deployment
- Integration with Kubernetes and jenkins
- Apache Tomcat UI needs be improved in my opinion
- Additional features can be added in main page
Usage of Apache Tomcat was chosen because we wanted to use WebSockets and no others implemented. So Tomcat was a forced-choice but we finished loving it. we did a very pioneering project injecting TIBCO Rendezvous inside tomcat so from web users have two-way communications with the backend!
- Loading shared libraries.
- Speed
- Very lightweight and scalable.
- Stability and debugging.
- A better IDE for local test.
- Logging in, not very clear at the beginning.
May 15, 2021
Tomcat is all you need (probably)
We use Apache Tomcat the primary application server for our company's software-as-a-service application. We have used Apache Tomcat since 2008. We use Apache Tomcat due to its many years of industry support and huge user community and ease-of-use. Tomcat is easy to configure and performs well for our needs.
- Seamless integration with the Apache Web Server
- Simple and fast deployment of Java applications
- Easy-to-integrate data sources
- Provides the most common capabilities for Java web deployments
- Management console takes work to secure so it is usually not used or usable for public applications
- Application memory leaks can be hard to trace and Tomcat does not always handle them well. This has improved greatly since version 7 though.
- Securing Tomcat could be made easier by not shipping with default demo applications enabled as these have had historical security issues
November 03, 2020
Great open-source web server for Java applications
All our development teams use Apache Tomcat. It is our best choice for our servers that run business modules and cron tasks. We use it as well in localhost for testing purposes. We use the Tomcat plugin with Jenkins for deployment.
- Built-in security features
- Relationship with IDEs like Eclipse
- Easy to configure and run
- User interface (the admin page)
- SSL installation
- A way to handle logs
- Memory leaks
February 07, 2020
Web app deployment made easy
We use Apache Tomcat to deploy our web applications in our organization. Web app deployment is simplistic with Apache Tomcat. Apache Tomcat also supports modern security demands. This is a lightweight and stable solution for hosting applications. Apache Tomcat has provided a rich API set. Documentations are widely available to learn about Apache Tomcat. Also, we host web application locally before deploying those to the production environment for development and testing purposes.
- Apache Tomcat is Open-sourced, and it's free to use.
- Easy to install and configure.
- Multiple applications can run at the same time without any issues.
- Apache Tomcat Has excellent built-in security features and provided a rich API sets.
- The User Interface is limited and very basic and needs to be improved.
- Support for full J2EE stack.
October 13, 2019
Apache Tomcat Review
Apache Tomcat, for us, is used only when we need to stand up an application in our localhost machine. It addresses the need for local servers to test our changes before we push the application to the cloud. As far as I'm aware, it is used by any application that uses the Spring Boot framework when standing the server in the local workspace, so I believe it is used across the whole organization.
- 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.
- It is not as robust as its competition, i.e. Oracle WebLogic.
- When dealing with much larger and more complex applications, there could be more crashes, failures, and memory leaks.
- The interface is very basic, comparatively, which allows for limited configuration.
July 10, 2019
Excellent web server for Java application
We use Tomcat as our Web Application server for small and middle size web application and expose Restful API microservices in our multiple projects. Tomcat provides a rich set of API so we could easy to integrate with our Gitlab pipeline to have full lifecycle CICD or build script to automate all deployment process.
- Tomcat support almost Web server feature we need including Connection pool, Tread pool, Https, Mutual and data Source
- Tomcat is lightweight, easy to install and configuration
- easy to customize startup and stop script to adjust memory or startup option
- provide rich API set
- intergrate with almost main IDE such as Eclipse, Intellij..
- Default log is not good enough and need to customize
- Tomcat interface is simple and have limit function
- Support for cluster is not good
November 30, 2018
Tomcat - small but powerful
Our organization use Tomcat to deploy mostly light Java based web applications. Many of our applications are being deployed in Apache Tomcat, due to the ease of deployment and cost factoring. We use Tomcat as our main applications server due to its performance and light weight.
- Lightweight. Does not require many resources to run.
- Stable. Once tuned almost no maintenance is required for the instance.
- Ease of deployment. Easy to install and set up. Documentations are widely available
- Cost. Open sourced!
- Mostly CLI based. GUI console although exist but not as user-friendly and basic.
- Custom configurations are not as intuitive and may have a steep learning curve.
April 20, 2018
Deploy apps with Apache Tomcat
We are using Apache Tomcat to deploy our web application; it's a robust servlet container which performs really well in production.
- Embedded Tomcat works like a charm for spring-boot apps
- It has all that's needed to deploy apps in prod
- The configuration is quite simple to implement and there is tons of documentation available on the internet
- Ability to manage Tomcat using a web console
- Support for JEE would be appreciated
April 06, 2018
Tomcat wide-scale use!
Apache Tomcat is being used in my organization to run seven of my ten applications. It has been our preferred solution for an application server for years as a lightweight and stable solution for hosting applications. It is currently being standardized across the whole company; however, we standardized on it years ago. It solves the problem of providing low-cost application servers that require very little maintenance but also provides excellent scalability at the web tier. The desire to drive down costs, while still providing solid secure solutions was a driving business factor in choosing to move to Tomcat.
- It is very lightweight and not resource intensive, which leads to fast start-up times
- It is very stable, I have not had an outage related to Tomcat in over 10 years and no longer even have support contracts for it.
- It's very scalable, especially in a cloud solution where you can perform auto-scaling and add nodes within short periods of time.
- Configuration could be made easier, but then again it's open source.
February 16, 2018
Speed up the launch of your light-weighted Web application/service
We use tomcat bundled with the SpringBoot in Fedex IT departments, majorly for small/middle-scaled and light-weighted web application and RESTful based micro services. Those light applications are supposed to be containerized to support the cloud-native initiative. Also for a quick POC purpose, we use Tomcat as the light solution to host some pure servlet based codes.
- tomcat is very light-weighted, that means a small memory footprint and a very quick starting time
- It also supports the modern security demands well
- Using the version bundled with the SpringBoot, saving the extra deployment efforts, making your single JVM application become the quick web service solution easily
- tomcat is just part of the J2EE specification implementation, majorly focusing on the servlet (front-end) part. If you requires the full J2ee stack, like EJB support, you need consider other containers like Weblogic
- tomcat's cluster level support is very limited
- tomcat's admin/configuration is not so intuitive, and default logging needs a lot of improvement
January 24, 2018
Quick Review on Tomcat
My organization offers a web product for mobile operators to expose their own web APIs as a managed service, which is expected to be highly performed since it handles millions of transactions on daily basis. So Apache Tomcat is a part of it by deploying all the web applications/services associated with the product.
- Apache Tomcat is the best lightweight servlet container for j2ee web applications.
- Unless you want advanced j2ee features, Tomcat is the right choice.
- Since this is open source, it is freely available for anyone to use.
- Apache tomcat does not come with the implementations of full j2ee stack.
- Developers who need the advanced features may realize that tomcat lacks some functionalities.
- Tomcat may raise memory issues if is not tuned up.
November 09, 2017
Apache Tomcat Review
Tomcat is utilized across our enterprise as a solid, complaint, j2ee web container.
- Tomcat easily integrates with Apache HTTP server over jk_mod.
- Web app deployment is simplistic.
- The application can be easily replicated across installations.
- The server is compact and can be deployed into various enterprise schemes, including virtual servers, cloud, docker containers, with little administration necessary.
- Tomcat can help facilitate micro services and make deployment management easier.
- Adding more default logging and log rotation capabilities outside of standard OS level Crontab would be appreciated
- The management console is an under utilized web app and for the most part could be discarded. If required, the app could be brought in but is mostly unnecessary overhead.
- Adding a mobile manager may also help users that are less inclined to get directly on the server.
Tomcat is being used as an application server across the organization. Most of our backend web applications and RESTful APIs run on Tomcat platform. Tomcat is baked into the AMI that is created for AWS and our web applications are pushed into the AMIs using Chef scripts. Then the tomcat server is brought up and applications are deployed.
- Tomcat is used for writing backend web applications in Java, Spring etc.
- They are also used to host our APIs. Our Spring or RestEasy API frameworks run are used to build APIs and Tomcat is the application server where they are hosted.
- Tomcat is a fairly stable and lightweight application server and it being open source lot of organizations are using it to host their applications.
- I have seen the use of Tomcat decline in recent years because of serverless technical platforms like Lambdas on AWS. Also Spring Boot and Jetty servers can run web applications/APIs by bringing container bundled into the app and without a need for separate server deployment and management. Same is the case with Spring boot, though in Spring Boot you could use embedded Tomcat too. But I have seen developers using Jetty more.
July 19, 2017
Tomcat eats Glassfish for breakfast
It is used by our IT department as a main web server. Most of our Java apps are hosted on this web container. We also use Tomcat to run our F5 application. So it acts as the main traffic controller for our domain.
- It's a lightweight Java servlet container. Has minimal memory footprint.
- It is fast and robust.
- Has good security features built in.
- Tomcat needs to improve its offerings for cluster based environments.
- They need to start providing support for Java EJBs
Apache Tomcat is being used to serve as an SSL encrypted web server that hosts an attendance and billing system for a non-profit private school that serves 256 students from parents and other school districts. The attendance and billing system has to be flexible to accommodate students and many school districts that send students to this school. It connects to MySQL which hosts the database and J2E development environment.
- Lightweight Web Server.
- SSL Encryption.
- Widely used and supported in the community.
- The UI is limited and very basic.
- Troubleshooting is sometimes difficult.
- Logging produces too much data and hard to find what caused a problem.
April 24, 2017
Happy with Tomcat
We use Tomcat as our web application server to develop marketing content. It is a solid tool with a reliable enduring track record which is something we need for our enterprise. Its popularity across the community helps us leverage what has been done already to speed up our own development by not re-inventing the wheel.
- Very stable, with solid application code, there is confidence in Tomcat's uptime.
- Good platform for integrating different pieces of Java technology.
- Very configurable.
- Would be nice to have some tools to make common configuration easier (e.g. SSL).
- Would be nice to make the learning curve less steep for those new to Tomcat.
- Would be nice to make configuration less difficult (perhaps JSON instead of XML).
We are using tomcat as a middleware web server for some of our Ellucian products including Degree Works and XE. It will soon be replacing all of our middleware products, particularly Oracle Fusion Middleware.
- Deploying and un deploying .war files is simple using either tomcat manager or the tomcat scripts
- Setting up is extremely easy, does not take much experience to set up the first time
- Startup and shutdown scripts are easily customizable.
- 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.
October 11, 2016
Tomcat Servers
Tomcat was our main server. We used it both in our local machines and we ran it in our Amazon Web Services host. This was only being used by the engineering team because no other teams needed to know what server we were running. In addition, it was only our web team that dealt with the actual server.
- The server is easy to install, start up and shut down.
- It integrates very cleanly with Eclipse.
- It's supported by AWS which makes deployments very smooth.
- Because it's Java-based, you typically must re-compile to make use of updates which can drastically increase development time.
- It was slightly painful to get set up in Eclipse relative to other newer solutions.
- It would be nice if it were easier and more intuitive to make changes to the server configurations.
August 03, 2016
Tomcat - quick, easy Servlet hosting
Apache Tomcat served as the Servlet Container for any web-based applications written in Java. It was used throughout the organization for a number of different products.
- Apache Tomcat is easy to install and get rolling quickly with a basic single-application deployment
- Tomcat provides a lot of fine-grained configuration around administrator permissions, and security in a multi-app environment
- Tomcat's management API actually makes it pretty easy to manage automatic code updates and self-updating code
- As an apache product, it would be nice to automate the common install/configuration/deployment of httpd alongside Tomcat, where httpd serves static files and only passes control to Tomcat in the case that a servlet needs to be invoked.
- Another nice-to-have would be the ability to, at installation time, specify the jar/war/folder that should be served from ROOT, rather than having the management interface be the default.
June 23, 2016
Excellent software! Free, Reliable, Open Source
In my company this software is used to deploy every web app that we produce. Each department of my company develops web apps that are suitable for Apache Tomcat; this software is our official servlet container. We configured it to handle hundreds of concurrent sessions, SSL connections, and redeploy web apps on the fly and so on.
- Very configurable to handle web apps deployed in many different places
- Very reliable and extensible
- It's used all over the world, it's very well documented and you can easily find solutions for your problems
- Sometimes it's not that easy to configure, we had problems configuring the SSL connection
- It doesn't have an EJB container
May 10, 2016
Free and lightweight application server
Apache Tomcat is the most widely adopted application server used in our company. We have currently over 2000 Tomcat 6 and Tomcat 7 instances and we're starting the adoption of Tomcat 8. Tomcat is used to run internal applications and hosted applications.
- It's very easy to install and requires few customizations in order to be production grade.
- Very low memory consumption compared to, for example, to JBoss.
- Nearly immediate start up time.
- It lacks a built-in feature to provide auto-recovery in case of failure, for example,OutOfMemoryError.
- In our company, we've been forced to use external tools like Monit or Java service wrapper.