tomcat vs. resin

[Ryan]

has anyone used both of these? anyone have opinions of how they compare?

 

[SMC]

has anyone used both of these? anyone have opinions of how they compare?

Resin made great claims to *much* better performance, however I compared
our rather big JSP based site running on both (on the same hardware) and
could barely tell the difference. We stuck with Tomcat (4.1) since its
performance was comparable, and it's open source and free (as in beer).

 

[hiwa]

has anyone used both of these? anyone have opinions of how they compare?

1)For different encodings handling, Resin is smart and Tomcat is
inflexible. Tomcat is good if everything is UTF-8.

2)For servlets and related classes, you store only source files on
Resin. Compile/recompile is done automatically. Quite handy.

3)Resin can be used as a stand-alone full server. Tomcat usually needs
Apache.

4)Resin mailing-list is adequate in its traffic. Tomcat is quite
overwhelming and your post does not always get good answer. Too many
newbies there!

5)If you are a paid customer of Resin, you can get full support from
Resin tech staff. License fee is cheap.

6)Resin dev lead Scott is a nice guy and very knowledgeable about Web
app technology in general. You can get good answers from him on their
mailing-list.

7)Resin configuration and deployment is much simpler than Tomcat.
Tomcat is unclear about the root responsibility of dev staff. Their
file set is quite messy.

 

[Oscar kind]

2)For servlets and related classes, you store only source files on
Resin. Compile/recompile is done automatically. Quite handy.

For online development this is perfect. Personally however, I prefer to
build .war files and deploy those. Your preference in this should
influence your choice.

3)Resin can be used as a stand-alone full server. Tomcat usually needs
Apache.

I disagree with that: Tomcat can perfectly act as a web server. It's just
a tad slower though (merely moderately fast instead of extremely fast).
But without apache it's also much easier to configure (i.e. it runs out of
the box).

5)If you are a paid customer of Resin, you can get full support from
Resin tech staff. License fee is cheap.

For companies, this is a good plus.

7)Resin configuration and deployment is much simpler than Tomcat.
Tomcat is unclear about the root responsibility of dev staff. Their
file set is quite messy.

IMHO, only the configuration part of this is relevant. And in that regard:
- Resin allows you to specify the authenticator for your web application
in web.xml. Ditto for the DataSource.
- Tomcat needs a separate configuration file next to the .war file here.

In this regards, I consider Resin to be better.


And then there is remote deployment (say on an acceptance test server) and
administration (say stopping a web application without removing it):
- Tomcat supports this very well, albeit in a simple way.
- Resin doesn't support this. Remote deployment must be done through
another system (SSH for example), and temporarily disabling a web
application is not possible at all without changing the configuration.

In this regards, I consider Tomcat to be better.

 

[Sudsy]

hiwa wrote:

3)Resin can be used as a stand-alone full server. Tomcat usually needs
Apache.

False. Both can be used as stand-alone servers. You get better performance
when you front-end with an HTTP server optimized for serving static content.
Six of one, half-dozen of the other...

5)If you are a paid customer of Resin, you can get full support from
Resin tech staff. License fee is cheap.

Compared to free?

7)Resin configuration and deployment is much simpler than Tomcat.
Tomcat is unclear about the root responsibility of dev staff. Their
file set is quite messy.

I have to disagree with you here: I found Resin to be much more
problematic to deploy than Tomcat. There's also more public-domain
documentation available for Tomcat. Your prior answer suggests
that you're at the mercy of the vendor for support. Do you really
want to be in that situation?

As an aside, could you clarify your relationship with Caucho? Your
mention of some familiarity with Scott could imply bias.

 

[hiwa]

As an aside, could you clarify your relationship with Caucho? Your
mention of some familiarity with Scott could imply bias.

I don't have any last bit of affiliation with caucho.com and my
opinion never implies bias or something. My opinion is only based on
my own experience with both servers for about four years.