JBOSS vs TOMCAT stand alone production environment

[Matthew Macchia]

Hey
So, here's the question. We currently have an an application running
on JRUN 2 (horribly ancient) and I have been given the task of trying
to update the situation. We need to port over our current application
as much as possible and I am debating our options. I would like to go
to JBOSS to allow us to migrate to EJB's in the future but we don't
really need it at the moment.

Is Tomcat up to snuff to run full fledged applications in a production
env?
Do we gain anything by deploying Tomcat alone right now and then
upgrading to JBOSS in the future?
Or do we deploy JBOSS now since it doesn't cost us much?

btw we need to run this parrallell to our current app running on JRUN
so we will have two instances of JSP containers running...

Please advise
thanks for your help!

 

[Wendy S]

Is Tomcat up to snuff to run full fledged applications in a production
env?

I sure hope so, or else don't tell all my users. I'm not running the
amazon.com site or anything, but by and large people are happy, me included.

Do we gain anything by deploying Tomcat alone right now and then
upgrading to JBOSS in the future?
Or do we deploy JBOSS now since it doesn't cost us much?

JBoss may be free, but your time and effort is not. If you only need
Tomcat, then I would only install Tomcat in production. Put JBoss on your
development box and experiment away, but I don't think I'd complicate the
production environment unnecessarily.

 

[Sudsy]

Matthew Macchia wrote:

Is Tomcat up to snuff to run full fledged applications in a production
env?
Absolutely!

Do we gain anything by deploying Tomcat alone right now and then
upgrading to JBOSS in the future?

Choose JBoss only if you're willing to tolerate some serious
limitations. You'll could actually lose some functionality as JBoss
ignores many of the Catalina configuration options. Forget about using
an alternate, "fixed" appBase and docBase, for example.

Or do we deploy JBOSS now since it doesn't cost us much?

As mentioned above, you WILL pay a price unless you structure your
application very carefully and use something like Apache with mod_jk
as the front-end. Partitioning has to be approached judiciously even
then.
Can it be done? Sure! Is it the best approach? Likely not, unless
all you want to do is "play" with EJBs. If you want to deploy them
in a serious production environment then you'd be better served by
a professional platform like WAS, IMHO.
I use Tomcat for a number of my websites but wouldn't DREAM of using
JBoss for anything important. YMMV.

 

[Matthew Macchia]

Thanks for the advice guys.
I think that we will deploy Tomcat alone.
Thanks!
-matt