GlassFish and Tomcat Comparison

Below is a table, originally created by Roger Keays (you can see the original blog post here), comparing the feature sets of Glassfish and Tomcat. See a missing or inaccurate entry? It's a wiki, so jump in and help us keep this up-to-date and accurate!

Pri	Standard features	Tomcat	WebLogic	Websphere	Glassfish	Comment
1	Adoption levels	high	?	?	good	Glassfish is new
2	Scalable	ok	?	?	yes	Glassfish has grizzly
2	Latest Web Tier JCP Specs. JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1, JSTL 1.2.	6.0.24	?	?	yes	TC 6 is not STABLE yet
2	Apache httpd integration through module	yes	yes	?	yes	ajp hack no longer needed in v3
3	Includes Java EE 5 Container	no	yes	?	yes	Weblogic is available with EE 5 (WLS) and without (WLX), only different license files
3	Dependency injection	no	?	?	yes
3	Container managed transactions	no	?	?	yes
3	OpenJPA entities enhanced automatically	no	?	?	yes
4	JDBC authentication	yes	?	?	yes	In Glassfish v1 ur1
	Virtual server features
1	Support for virtual hosting	yes	?	?	yes
1	Deploy same webapp to multiple hosts	yes	?	?	yes
1	Configure same webapp differently	yes	?	?	yes	Possible in Tomcat's context.xml or server.xml
2	Per virtual host logging	ok	?	?	yes	Tomcat's JULI is a bit buggy [1], [2]
2	Each host has their own authentication realm	yes	?	?	yes
3	Each host has their own deployment dir	yes	?	?	no
4	Each host has a jailed manager	yes	?	?	no
4	Support for alternate docroots	no	?	?	yes
4	Each host can listen on a different port	ok	?	?	yes	Tomcat requires an additional <Service> containers [3]
5	Each host can listen on an arbitrary combination of ports	no	?	?	yes	For Tomcat, a host in one <Service> cannot share ports with a host in another <Service> [4]

References

This page (revision-12) was last changed on 04-Feb-10 09:44 AM, -0800 by Scott Melton.
This page was created on 16-Dec-06 07:40 AM, -0800 by EduardoPelegriLlopart.

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