glassfish v3 vs tomcat 7

Question

Which one do you recommend for web and why?

Solution

I don't recommend any particular one. If you want just JSP/Servlet support, both suffices. If you want more than that (e.g. anything provided by the Java EE API which is much more than alone JSP/Servlet), then Tomcat simply don't suffice without manually adding a bunch of components on top of that to comply the complete Java EE API like JBoss AS is doing.

In (Eclipse) development terms, Tomcat is a quick starter and restarter, takes about 3 seconds. Glassfish is a slow starter, takes 5~10 seconds for a simple webapp, but it is an extremely fast hotdeployer (by this Glassfish Eclipse plugin). All happens in a subsecond while Tomcat usually takes 3 seconds for this (yes, Tomcat is then basically restarting itself).

Comments

[matbrgz]

How do you hotdeploy so fast? The Server Adapter is slow even with automatic publishing.

[BalusC]

@Thor: Are you using v3? I can't remember it ever being slow. However, Glassfish v2 indeed used to be irritating slow in hotdeploys. Using their provided Eclipse Plugin btw.

[matbrgz]

yes, Eclipse 3.6 with the Eclipse Plugin. I've now started with a clean Eclipse and downloaded the autodiscovered Glassfish plugin, and the default behaviour is still to require manual publishing. Have you set "Automatically publish when resources change" and lowered the interval to something less than the default 15 seconds?

[BalusC]

@Thor: Yes, you need to set that as such. The interval is here just set to 0 (sorry for late comment, I discovered this dangling comment for the first when I received another upvote on this post a few minutes ago).