
That being said, I still want to lay down a general framework that will help you choose. To be honest, the answer will vary from project to project. So which Java application server should you use in your own project? Note: Red Hat was just acquired by IBM for $34 billion, its largest deal ever. That says a lot about the company’s policies and customer support.
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Red Hat is also one of the most respected software vendors out there. This means that you can use WildFly today and quickly migrate to JBoss EAP in the future to get commercial support if you decide that’s something you need. The big advantage of WildFly over GlassFish is that Red Hat provides an easy migration path from WildFly to its commercially supported application server called JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. WildFly, formerly known as JBoss Application Server and developed by Red Hat, is another fully featured and certified application server. Consider what your future needs might look like, at the very least. It might not sound like a big deal to you right now, but it’s a deal-breaker for many businesses. So keep in mind that if you use GlassFish and need commercial support in the future, you’ll need to migrate to a completely different application server. That’s what commercial support provides, and many companies purchase it.

As your project grows and becomes financially successful, you might be willing to pay to get long-term support, security updates, customer support, etc., for your application server.
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Yes, this article is about free and open-source application servers, but this is still an important point. The downside of GlassFish is its lack of commercial support.

Therefore, GlassFish will always support the latest Java EE features first. This means that GlassFish is used to showcase Java EE capabilities, and it gets contributions from the same people who define Java EE standards. It’s the reference implementation of the Java EE standard. In fact, GlassFish is more than just a generic Java EE application server. As such, GlassFish is more heavyweight than either Tomcat or Jetty-and, arguably, a bit more difficult to operate. GlassFish is fully featured and certified Java EE application server developed by Oracle. Both make Jetty a great fit for constrained environments and for embedding in other products. Two of its main selling points are its compactness and small footprint. And just like Tomcat, you can still use most of the features by including additional third-party dependencies.Įven though Jetty’s market share is nowhere near Tomcat’s, it’s still widely used in the industry. Just like Tomcat, it lacks support for many Java EE features. Jetty is another application server (this one developed by Eclipse Foundation) that isn’t technically a fully featured Java EE container. With good documentation and no shortage of tutorials about it on the internet, Tomcat is a serious contender for the role of application server in almost all Java web applications. So Tomcat is mature, well-documented, and the most widely used Java application server. I’m guessing you’re looking for a solution and aren’t that interested in terminology intricacies, so I’ll keep calling Tomcat (and later Jetty) an application server to avoid complicating things with too many terms. The bottom line is that you can run Java EE applications on Tomcat. You’ll just need to include them as additional third-party dependencies in your application. But even though Tomcat doesn’t support some Java EE features out of the box, you can still use most of these features. The accurate title for Tomcat would be either “web server” or “servlet container”. Indeed, Tomcat doesn’t implement all the features required of a Java EE application server.
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Also, there is a Web Profile subset of the full EE platform now available, as well as a servlet-only web container. Oracle has transferred Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, and it is now called Jakarta EE after Java EE 8. As of today, Oracle lists three such containers, and Tomcat isn’t one of them. Therefore, strictly speaking, I should call only the containers that pass Java EE compatibility tests by the name application servers.

A specification called Java EE precisely defines the functionality of application servers. Remember when I said that application servers provide some infrastructure and functional capabilities to your application? Well, this set of capabilities isn’t arbitrary. See, I’m calling it an application server when technically…it isn’t. However, there’s a bit of confusion (and even controversy) about Tomcat’s merit as an application server. Some sources claim Tomcat’s market share to be more than a whopping 60% of all Java application server deployments.

Tomcat is the most popular application server used with Java web applications developed by the Apache Software Foundation.
