Using Tomcat Web Container in Enterprise

We are implementing enterprise portal for one o开发者_StackOverflow中文版f our client. As part of architecture evaluation we are considering number of web containers - Apache Tomcat being one of them.

There are number of Tomcat based enterprise solutions emerging in J2EE arena, to name some of them:

• Enterprise Tomcat server from Spring Source
• TCat server from Mule Source
• IBM WebSphere Community Edition Tomcat Container
• JBoss Web Server based on Tomcat

We have seen there are certain enterprise extensions provided by these distributions to make Tomcat more robust and enterprise ready. These extensions are in following areas:

• Connection pooling
• Management Extensions
• Thread pooling and IO extensions
• Configuration extensions

Would like to know the experience on these (or if there are any other enterprise distribution) and also are there any enterprise extensions available - such as connection pools, management extensions or secure configuration extensions

May I also suggest Eclipse Virgo server as an alternative (former SpringSource dm Server). This is an OSGi container that uses Tomcat for the web front end. You can easily install the extensions you need as OSGi bundles. It isn't a full J2EE container and you can skip the things you don't need.

In general, if you need some of the full J2EE capabilities, it would be better to go with a full J2EE container that offers them out of the box, than trying to add them to Tomcat somehow. OSGi containers offer an alternative, as they allow you to easily manage the features you need.

I developed enterprise web solutions with J2EE for the last eight years and had no problem using the open source tomcat solution. Using database access, you should use connection pooling, but Apache Commons DBCP does its work. I also used MBeans accessible by the jconsole in the tomcat (using Spring @ManagedResource), The tomcat has also Thread pooling like any J2EE implementation.

From my experience, most of the "commercial" versions exist to create consulting needs (it is nearly impossible to install a WebSphere without a IBM consultant ;-)