Item: Apache Tomcat
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Since it has no license costs, it's possible to scale up infrastructure without additional software costs.
The lack of business support is not a problem since there's a huge knowledge base inside our company and in the open source community.

Alternatives Considered

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

It's clear that JBoss is a full JEE stack implementation while Tomcat isn't, but if you don't need the whole JEE stack there are many lightweight alternatives that implement the required feature with Tomcat.

Other Software Used

WSO2 Carbon, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle WebLogic Application Server

Likelihood to Recommend

It's more appropriate for highly scalable stateless applications since it's very easy to add instances to your deploy. Session clustering is not natively implemented, so if you've stateful applications you'll need some externally provided persistency layer.

Users and Roles

Mainly developers, but also beta testers and, obviously system administrators

Support Headcount Required

System administrators with middleware skills, in particular apache web server and mod_shib, Apache tomcat and Java.

Business Processes Supported

Corporate internal portal
Web applications used by academic customers
Shibboleth identity providers

Innovative Uses

Tomcat is still the number one choice for new applications in our company

Future Planned Uses

We plan to use Tomcat inside docker containers

Likelihood to Renew

10

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

Products Replaced

No

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Usability
Prior Experience with the Product

We have had a long-term positive experience with Tomcat, so we're happy to continue to use it; also because it's free.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

In some cases, we've used JBoss enterprise, and while reviewing our choice we realized that probably Tomcat would have covered the customer requirements as well with no additional fees.

Product Configurability

8

I think that it's just right

Configuration Lessons

It's important to remember to set up the ajp connector properly in server.xml. In particular, the maxThreads value has to be consistent with the number of maxActiveSessions defined inside the application context. It's also a best practise to set a value for connection Timeout for the ajp connector in order to avoid a waste of resources for inactive sessions.

UI Customization

No - there is no facility to customize the interface

Extensibility and Customization

No - we have not done any custom code

Additional Customization Considerations

If you want to delegate authentication to some external entity (for example Shibboleth SP) just remember to set the tomcatAuthentication flag inside server.xml to "false"