Tomcat Roars Alone
Tomcat users look to the Web for support, favor simplicity
November 8, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Tomcat has clearly marked off its turf in the corner of the Java alley.
For companies deploying Java-backed Web applications, the Apache Software Foundation's Tomcat Web container is used by almost two-thirds of corporate Java developers, according to BZ Research, a division of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times. Those kinds of numbers imply that there should be a bustling community of open source service and support companies cropping up around the platform, but that’s not the case. Even the nation's largest Apache service and support company, Covalent, sees this open source application server as a breeze to support.
Tim Dean, a QA engineer and senior systems administrator with Military.com, doesn't have an emergency phone contact for Tomcat. His company, a subsidiary of Monster.com, purchases support contracts for much of its network and server equipment, but despite being in a production environment where everything runs on Tomcat, Dean doesn't feel like he needs a service-level agreement (SLA) for it.
“We've always had good success with products from the Apache Foundation,” said Dean. “The amount of open source support makes it really easy to maintain without support contracts. For the open source sys admin who prefers to do things themselves, it's really comforting.”
But that doesn’t mean that Mark Brewer, CEO of Covalent, is unhappy. His company sells SLAs to enterprises running Apache software, and Tomcat coverage is currently the most popular of his company's service and support offerings.
“It is our largest new customer base over the last three years; 60 percent have been Tomcat. We started supporting it in 2001 when it was fairly immature. Now we have full-time Tomcat engineers on staff,” said Brewer.
He admitted that supporting Tomcat is much less trouble than, for example, the Apache Web server. “It's easier to self-support for Tomcat than Apache. Apache people know it's been around forever; the code changes a lot, but people don't upgrade that often. Tomcat...because it’s a Java application server, the [first] perception is…it needs support,” said Brewer.
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