posted by stagr.lee on May 19, 2010 05:46 AM

What led to my use of Tomcat started years before I had ever heard of Jakarta or Tomcat. I think it was late 1999 or early 2000 and inside E*TRADE there was a lively discussion going on for weeks in our hallways, in the conference rooms, and over email about standardizing on either servlets or enterprise java beans (EJB). I was crazy busy trying to get single sign-on and application federation server infrastructure installed at the time and was just hoping that the EJB/Servlet issue would resolve without any violence. The java application team standardized on servlets and the the resulting products were highly successful!

Around 2001, many of our peers in the industry went with EJBs and were having failed project after failed project. Our servlet-based software was running great, but was too expensive as we were on proprietary frameworks deployed over many nodes. To address costs we moved to open source, with Tomcat being a central part of that strategy. At that point, we really started feeling like we dodged a bullet by not adopting EJBs.

Open source EJBs were years away from being deployable and commercial ones were sketchy. Remember, this was the time of the PetStore reference EJB app and all of the theater around it. If you don’t remember PetStore, it's the app that made .NET look fantastic and allowed SpringSource to become a $362 million company!

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