Apache Tomcat 7,-great lightweight container for simple web apps
April 12, 2017
Apache Tomcat 7,-great lightweight container for simple web apps
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Apache Tomcat
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.
- It has simplified administration efforts, thus saving much time to focus on other projects and issues.
- It saves us in costs, as there are no licensing requirements.
- It gives us the ability to manage all of our java applets in one place, so as to be able to host both development and production systems on one server.
Well WebLogic is very complex. Most of what happens with WebLogic requires servers to be restarted, which isn't always possible. Also, Oracle tries to force you to only use their GUI interface for most of the administration, which could be done directly in the files, but are discouraged. Although I didn't directly choose tomcat, as it was already bundled with a few of our ERP products, I do prefer it over WebLogic, and we are going to be moving directly to tomcat in the near future once we can move away from Oracle forms.