Apache Tomcat vs Wildfly

Overview

Apache Tomcat

Stacks16.9K

Followers12.6K

Votes201

GitHub Stars8.0K

Forks5.3K

Wildfly

Stacks187

Followers226

Votes6

Apache Tomcat vs Wildfly: What are the differences?

Apache Tomcat and Wildfly are popular Java-based application servers that serve as the runtime environment for Java applications. Here are the key differences between Apache Tomcat and Wildfly:

Server Type and Features: Apache Tomcat is a lightweight web server and servlet container that focuses primarily on serving Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) applications. On the other hand, Wildfly is a full-fledged Java EE (Enterprise Edition) application server that supports a broader range of Java EE specifications, including Java Persistence API (JPA), Java Message Service (JMS), and more.
Java EE Compatibility: Apache Tomcat is not a fully certified Java EE server but provides limited support for Java EE technologies. It implements only the servlet and JSP specifications, while other Java EE features may require additional configuration or external libraries. Wildfly, on the other hand, is a fully certified Java EE server that conforms to the Java EE specifications. It provides a complete Java EE runtime environment, supporting a wide range of Java EE technologies and APIs out of the box.
Administration and Management: Apache Tomcat offers a simple and straightforward administration interface that allows for basic configuration and management of the server. It provides a web-based administration tool and configuration files that can be edited manually. In contrast, Wildfly offers a more advanced and feature-rich administration console, known as the Wildfly Management Console. It provides extensive control over server configurations, deployments, monitoring, and other management aspects.
Clustering and High Availability: Wildfly provides robust clustering and high availability features out of the box. It supports distributed deployments, session replication, load balancing, and failover mechanisms, making it suitable for enterprise applications with high scalability and availability requirements. Apache Tomcat, being a lightweight server, does not offer built-in clustering capabilities. However, it can be used in conjunction with external load balancers and clustering solutions to achieve similar functionality.
Community and Ecosystem: Apache Tomcat has a thriving community and ecosystem, with extensive documentation and support resources. Wildfly, as part of the JBoss community, also benefits from a strong community, development contributions, and technology integrations.

In summary, Apache Tomcat is a lightweight web server and servlet container that focuses on serving Java web applications, while Wildfly is a full-fledged Java EE application server that supports a broader range of Java EE technologies. Apache Tomcat is simpler and more lightweight, while Wildfly offers advanced features, Java EE compatibility, and extensive management capabilities.

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Advice on Apache Tomcat, Wildfly

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.

419k views419k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Apache Tomcat	Wildfly
Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.	It is a flexible, lightweight, managed application runtime that helps you build amazing applications. It supports the latest standards for web development.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 8.0K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.3K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 16.9K	Stacks 187
Followers 12.6K	Followers 226
Votes 201	Votes 6
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 3 Eclipse integration 3 Java
Integrations
No integrations available	IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse

What are some alternatives to Apache Tomcat, Wildfly?

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.

Related Comparisons

Server Type and Features: Apache Tomcat is a lightweight web server and servlet container that focuses primarily on serving Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) applications. On the other hand, Wildfly is a full-fledged Java EE (Enterprise Edition) application server that supports a broader range of Java EE specifications, including Java Persistence API (JPA), Java Message Service (JMS), and more.
Java EE Compatibility: Apache Tomcat is not a fully certified Java EE server but provides limited support for Java EE technologies. It implements only the servlet and JSP specifications, while other Java EE features may require additional configuration or external libraries. Wildfly, on the other hand, is a fully certified Java EE server that conforms to the Java EE specifications. It provides a complete Java EE runtime environment, supporting a wide range of Java EE technologies and APIs out of the box.
Administration and Management: Apache Tomcat offers a simple and straightforward administration interface that allows for basic configuration and management of the server. It provides a web-based administration tool and configuration files that can be edited manually. In contrast, Wildfly offers a more advanced and feature-rich administration console, known as the Wildfly Management Console. It provides extensive control over server configurations, deployments, monitoring, and other management aspects.
Clustering and High Availability: Wildfly provides robust clustering and high availability features out of the box. It supports distributed deployments, session replication, load balancing, and failover mechanisms, making it suitable for enterprise applications with high scalability and availability requirements. Apache Tomcat, being a lightweight server, does not offer built-in clustering capabilities. However, it can be used in conjunction with external load balancers and clustering solutions to achieve similar functionality.
Community and Ecosystem: Apache Tomcat has a thriving community and ecosystem, with extensive documentation and support resources. Wildfly, as part of the JBoss community, also benefits from a strong community, development contributions, and technology integrations.

Apache Tomcat vs Wildfly