Overview

Apache Tomcat

Stacks16.9K

Followers12.6K

Votes201

GitHub Stars8.0K

Forks5.3K

GeoServer

Stacks91

Followers82

Votes0

GitHub Stars4.2K

Forks2.3K

Apache Tomcat vs GeoServer: What are the differences?

Introduction

Apache Tomcat and GeoServer are two popular open-source software applications used for different purposes. While Apache Tomcat is a web server and servlet container, GeoServer is a geospatial server that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Despite some similarities in their functionality and support for Java-based development, there are several key differences between Apache Tomcat and GeoServer.

Architecture: Apache Tomcat is designed as a web server and servlet container, providing a runtime environment for Java-based web applications. It serves as a host for Java Servlets, JavaServer Pages (JSP), and other Java-based technologies. On the other hand, GeoServer is a specialized geospatial server that focuses on serving geospatial data in various formats like WMS (Web Map Service) and WFS (Web Feature Service).
Functionality: Apache Tomcat primarily focuses on running web applications and supporting Java-based web technologies. It provides support for servlets, JSP, and JavaServer Faces (JSF). On the other hand, GeoServer is designed specifically for managing and serving geospatial data. It offers functionalities like data storage, data styling, and spatial analysis.
Data Integration: Apache Tomcat does not have built-in functionality for working with geospatial data. It primarily deals with web application deployment and execution. In contrast, GeoServer is designed to handle geospatial data and provides various mechanisms to integrate different types of data sources. It supports file-based data sources like shapefiles, as well as relational databases and web services.
User Interface: Apache Tomcat does not provide a graphical user interface (GUI) out of the box. It usually requires manual configuration and management through XML-based configuration files. On the other hand, GeoServer offers a web-based administration interface that allows users to configure and manage the server easily. It provides a GUI for data management, styling, and other server settings.
Community and Ecosystem: Apache Tomcat has a large and active community of users and developers, contributing to its ongoing development and improvement. It has been widely adopted as a standard web server and servlet container for Java-based applications. GeoServer also has a significant user community, mainly within the geospatial domain. However, its ecosystem is more specific and focused on geospatial data management and sharing.
Purpose: The primary purpose of Apache Tomcat is to serve as a Java-based web server and servlet container, providing a runtime environment for Java web applications. It focuses on supporting general web development and deployment scenarios. On the other hand, GeoServer is specifically designed for geospatial data management and sharing, targeting users who deal with geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial data.

In summary, Apache Tomcat and GeoServer are two distinct software applications with different purposes. Apache Tomcat is a web server and servlet container focused on web application execution, while GeoServer is a geospatial server specialized in managing and serving geospatial data. Their architecture, functionality, data integration capabilities, user interface, community, and purpose are the key differences that set them apart.

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Advice on Apache Tomcat, GeoServer

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	GeoServer
Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.	It is developed, tested, and supported as community-driven project by a diverse group of individuals and organizations. It is designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 8.0K	GitHub Stars 4.2K
GitHub Forks 5.3K	GitHub Forks 2.3K
Stacks 16.9K	Stacks 91
Followers 12.6K	Followers 82
Votes 201	Votes 0
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	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Apache Tomcat, GeoServer?

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.