Apache Maven vs. Apache Tomcat

Building and automating packaging of software can be a challenging task. As the complexity of the project grows so do the dependencies on third-party artifacts. Using Maven we can define and manage the project structure centrally and it helps improve overall build times.

Incentivized

Tomcat is more than enough to deploy most of the mid-end web applications without any problem but for the high-end applications which require high scalability and high availability, which might need some tune-ups with the support of expertise in this regard. Otherwise, you may realize numerous performance issues, memory leaks, server crashes etc.

Incentivized

• Makes the build process simple and easy to do.
• It provides a standard build system that can be adopted by multiple, different groups within an organization.
• It's extensible with easy to use custom extensions which our developers take full advantage of.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• One of the issues with building software using Apache Maven is that its cache resolution is not optimal. It pulls down all the artifacts onto the developer's local machine and can sometimes result in conflicts.
• The build process can vary in time and gets progressively longer as the project's complexity increases.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The overall usability of Apache Maven is very good to us. We were able to incorporate it into our company's build process pretty quickly. We deployed it to multiple teams throughout the entire enterprise. We got good feedback from our developers stating that Apache Maven has simplified their build process. It also allowed to to standardize the build process for the entire enterprise, thus ensure that each development team is using the same, consistent process to build code.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I can't speak to the support, as I've never had issues. Apache Maven "just works," and errors were user errors or local nexus errors. Apache Maven is a great build/dependency management tool. I give it a 9/10 because occasionally the error message don't immediately indicate a solution...but again, those errors were always user or configuration errors, and the Maven documentation is extensive, so I don't find fault in Maven, but in its users.

Incentivized

Well, in actuality, I have never needed support for Apache Tomcat since it is configured and ready-to-go with no configuration needed on my end.

Incentivized

Ant is useful if your build is heavily based on customs scripts running in the right order. Maven greatly simplifies the process to keep track of and download build dependencies compared with Apache Ant. If your build is based on multiple custom scripts running in a specific order there is a lot of overhead in Maven compared to Apache Ant.

Incentivized

Commercial application servers are available that support enterprise application needs, but many times this is overkill for most web applications running in the cloud, particularly for independent software vendors. The capabilities and management tools provided with these applications are superior to Tomcat, but most times unnecessary for the vast majority of web applications developed in Java.

Incentivized

It's very easy to add instances to an existing deployment and, using apache with mod proxy balancer, to scale up the serving farm

Incentivized

• Maven has been the only tool for building Java apps for a long time. And it being open source has helped maximize ROI.
• I can't think of any negative. With Gradle coming up as a newer and better technology for building, some teams are shifting towards it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized