Apache Tomcat vs Cowboy

Overview

Apache Tomcat

Stacks16.9K

Followers12.6K

Votes201

GitHub Stars8.0K

Forks5.3K

Cowboy

Stacks711

Followers72

Votes19

GitHub Stars7.4K

Forks1.2K

Cowboy vs Apache Tomcat: What are the differences?

Developers describe Cowboy as "Small, fast, modular HTTP server written in Erlang". Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings. Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang. On the other hand, Apache Tomcat is detailed as "An open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies". Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Cowboy and Apache Tomcat can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

"Websockets integration" is the primary reason why developers consider Cowboy over the competitors, whereas "Easy" was stated as the key factor in picking Apache Tomcat.

Cowboy and Apache Tomcat are both open source tools. It seems that Cowboy with 5.59K GitHub stars and 999 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Apache Tomcat with 3.51K GitHub stars and 2.4K GitHub forks.

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Advice on Apache Tomcat, Cowboy

Hari

Mar 3, 2020

Needs advice

I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to

configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly.
Install apache and tomcat.
Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server.
Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports.
Create users on RHEL for application support team.
other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.

I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.

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Detailed Comparison

Apache Tomcat	Cowboy
Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.	Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings. Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 8.0K	GitHub Stars 7.4K
GitHub Forks 5.3K	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 16.9K	Stacks 711
Followers 12.6K	Followers 72
Votes 201	Votes 19
Pros & Cons
Pros 79 Easy 72 Java 49 Popular 1 Spring web Cons 3 Blocking - each http request block a thread 2 Easy to set up	Pros 8 Websockets integration 6 Cool name 3 Good to use with Erlang 2 Anime mascot

What are some alternatives to Apache Tomcat, Cowboy?

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.