Apache Tomcat vs. IBM DevOps Deploy

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

IBM UrbanCode Deploy is excellent for code deployments such as Java, .Net, C++, etc. It can also deploy and run SQLs reasonably well. Where it lacks is the ability for executables, Jars, WARs, EARs, etc.

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

• Consistently deploys to multiple environments with no changes to the process. Having reusable processes across environments from Dev to Production make deployments more consistent and easier to manage.
• IBM UrbanCode Deploy has an easy to understand UI, to be able to review if a deployment has successfully completed or not, and details if it did not work. Using the UI is simple and easy to understand.
• Scheduling and approvals are built-in as configured for the deployments. This allows us to use the same deployment process, but get approvals as needed when code is moved up to the upper environments.

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

• Use of the internal API for public API use.
• Less cryptic CLI output on commands.
• Better use of custom variables that don't interfere with UCD's use.

Incentivized

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

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

It's challenging to get a working knowledge of the product without having someone show you the ropes. Linking components with applications and applications with resource trees and resource trees with application deploys is not intuitive. However, once past that learning curve, the possibilities open up, and things become easier to understand and allow for further granularity.

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

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

I've not worked directly with IBM UrbanCode Deploy support. My DevOps team administers the environment and deals with that.

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

• 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

• Push button deployments.
• Consistency and ability to focus on other tasks.
• Required quite a bit of upfront customization with certain web deployments (WebSphere, etc.)
• Opened the door to other types of deployments and other automation.

Incentivized