Tomcat - quick, easy Servlet hosting
August 03, 2016

Tomcat - quick, easy Servlet hosting

David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Apache Tomcat

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.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • 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.
  • Apache Tomcat made auto-updating a fairly straightforward process, allowing us to easily implement continuous integration and delivery to the customer.
GlassFish seemed to be fairly comparable in terms of easy of configuration and deployment, but we didn't do any side-by-side performance comparisons. Tomcat was better-known by the team, has more online forum support, and met the requirements of our project. Tomcat is fairly easy to deploy and forget, and then focus on developing the actual web application itself.
Tomcat is well suited for simple Servlet-based applications that use more modern approaches to web-based applications (a simple servlet entry point, backed by web MVC resources). For EJB-style applications, perhaps WebLogic might be more appropriate.

Apache Tomcat Feature Ratings

IDE support
10
Security management
10
Administration and management
8
Application server performance
7
Installation
7
Open-source standards compliance
10

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