Which Java application servers are currently in use at your company?
In the last few weeks, this question has been asked many times in different places (1, 2, 3). All showing an impressive result: Tomcat is leading.
Note. I would like to be more specific in the question cause some people could argue that Tomcat is not an application server, which is true, it is a web server with some additionals. The question could be re written to ‘Where do you run your applications at your company?’
1. BEA WebLogic (various versions) and JBoss AS shared first place among Java EE app servers on 16% each, with IBM WebSphere just behind on 15% and Glassfish putting in a creditable performance on 5%. But the easy winner was Tomcat, on 37%.
2. A study conducted by BZ Research found that Tomcat is used by 64 percent of corporate Java developers.
3. Results: Apache Tomcat, 64.3%; IBM WebSphere App Server, 36.9%; JBoss Application Server, 32.0%; BEA WebLogic App Server, 23.7%; Oracle App Server, 22.4%; Sun Java Enterprise System, 19.0%; Apache Geronimo 11.8%; SAP NetWeaver, 6.0%
It seems to be that Tomcat is not just building momentum, right now it is leading. Surely it is helped by the stack Spring + Hibernate + MySQL, which is a wonderful open source stack. This will cover most of the requirements that are needed in many companies (e.g. SOA), however, in other cases EJBs, Java Messaging (JMS), or distributed transactions (XA) among others are required, so in that cases jumping to a JBoss looks like a good option, which of course is running a Tomcat for the web side.