posted by Stacey Schneider on October 15, 2012 08:05 AM

Traditional Java EE (JEE) app servers bring complexity to the mix. In addition, they are costly and consume a lot of resources. Forrester wrote an article in 2011 about the costs saying, “Use Apache Tomcat. It is free.” IDC’s research from 2011 points how enterprises are moving “toward lower-cost application platforms that shift them closer to private, public, and hybrid cloud offerings.” Of course, you can find plenty of historical posts and debates from practitioners on costs and resources from past years.

This year at JavaOne and VMworld, we heard plenty of feedback about simplicity from architects and developers – it’s certainly been popular for a while.

So, if you are looking at middleware support for mobile apps, in-memory databases, auto- scaling, and virtual/cloud infrastructure, then you might want to check out our webinar coming up on Thursday, October 25th. In this session, we will cover quite a bit about vFabric tc Server:

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posted by MSacks on May 17, 2010 03:07 PM

Often times a developer or operations professional needs access to monitor a Tomcat instance for purposes of capacity planning, troubleshooting, and performance tuning. There are many tools available already for Tomcat, some of them open source, and others paid for. Some tools are simple and others are complex management suites.

There are comprehensive monitoring suites available that monitor and manage Tomcat, and do it well; however, there is always a benefit to being able to create your own custom Tomcat/application management tools. The first advantage is that you get exactly what you want out of your utility. In my example, I wanted to have a way to browse a Tomcat server’s Java Management Extensions’ MBeans with a hierarchical, bash-like navigation. This allows me to quickly find and diagnose problems with my Tomcat server or custom applications running within Tomcat, and is more precise than trending those MBeans over time using a more comprehensive monitoring suite. I liken it to purchasing a ready-made suit, or having one custom tailored to your exact specification. It just feels better sometimes, and other times it is not practical.

Why Create Your Own Custom Tools

Many utilities will not provide the specific feature that you need. There are usually a host of open source or commercial utilities for anything that one goal any developer or operations professional may want to achieve; however, often times that utility will not integrate well into their existing infrastructure, or not play well with automated processes that are pre-existing in the enterprise. In such cases, a custom utility can come in handy. Writing your own tools from scratch is a quick solution to a specific problem, and cuts out a lot of the fat. For simple tools, the complexity risk argument just isn't there, and in the time it takes to write a simple custom application.

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