posted by joannad on December 30, 2010 08:53 PM

2010 has been an exciting year for the Tomcat Expert community site. Created by the Apache Tomcat Experts at SpringSource, Tomcat Expert was launched in March to improve the adoption, performance and value of Apache Tomcat for enterprise users. After almost ten months of operation, we’ve been able to provide you with content from Tomcat Expert Contributors weighing in on top Apache Tomcat news and topics, including several relating to June's release of Tomcat 7.0.0 Beta, the first Tomcat 7 release.  As the year winds down, we've put together a list of the most popular blog posts of the year. Additionally, we're asking you to tell us what topics you'd like to see covered more in 2011 with a content request form below. 

Read More

posted by avanabs on April 21, 2010 09:09 AM

We've been discussing the various support options, including community support, available for Apache Tomcat, and contrasting those to Commercial JEE Application Server Support options. In this final blog in the series, we're focusing on the remaining two Tomcat Options, Self Support and Vendor Support agreements.

Tomcat Self Support

The second option is supporting Tomcat within the IT organization. In this case, the IT organization must have significant Tomcat expertise on staff and they provide much/all of the support to the various users within the organization. Both the level of expertise required and the challenges of providing that for 24x7x365 mission critical applications are neither simple nor inexpensive.

Less understood is that server infrastructure software is inherently different from application software. It’s a specialty within the software industry; relatively few programmers have the skills and expertise to deal with the kinds of problems found within operating systems and application containers. Realistically, it takes a substantial scale of operations to make this option viable, but for very large organizations, the cost savings and ability to control the process may make self support worthwhile.

Read More

posted by avanabs on April 15, 2010 10:23 AM

In prior entries, we’ve discussed Commercial JEE Application Server Support, the reasons this support is so costly, and began discussions focusing on the support differences between Tomcat and commercial JEE Application Servers. Now we’ll explore the three general types of Tomcat support that are available and dig into the most common choice, Community Support.

Tomcat Server Support Options

Tomcat users have three options available for support:

• Community Support—The Apache Tomcat distribution is “supported” by the Tomcat community, on a volunteer basis. Repairs/enhancements are made (or accepted) by the Project Management Committee and committers (see below for details) on a best efforts basis, with no guarantees of either resolution or timeliness. Community support depends on the user doing some of the work, with the community providing expert advice.
• Self Support—IT organizations can also support Tomcat themselves, by taking the source distribution, becoming sufficiently expert, and repairing/enhancing their copy of Tomcat. They may provide these back to the community if desired, and the community may accept the submissions if they decide that they meet broad customer needs and community technical standards. Self supporting organizations also can take advantage of the Tomcat community, although with the same limitations faced by the Community Support strategy. Self support does create the possibility of generating a branch in the Tomcat code, which may matter to some IT organizations.
• Vendor Support—IT organizations can also purchase support from one of the Tomcat vendors, who already have the expertise and may already be active in the Apache community. In this case, the IT organization is outsourcing the Tomcat internals expertise, learning curve, community relationship activities, maintenance, test, and platform integration.
  
  Vendor support for Tomcat is similar to commercial JEE application server support in several ways, including outsourcing much of the detailed expertise and depending on the vendor to meet responsiveness guarantees. The huge difference is choice, leading to far more cost effective solutions in a competitive marketplace.

Read More

posted by avanabs on April 8, 2010 09:18 AM

Proprietary Closed Source Application Server Support

The major JEE Application Server vendors offer sophisticated, feature rich, products sold under vendor licenses, together with providing annual maintenance support agreements. While it may not be strictly mandatory (salesmen often tell the customer that it is…commissions on support are very high) for the customer to purchase a support agreement, virtually 100% of the customers do. Since these products are based on proprietary closed source software technology, only those with access to the vendor’s source code can provide maintenance or enhancements to the product. Given the choice of forgoing support, patches, and upgrades, or of paying for the vendor’s maintenance agreement, customers pay, and pay, and pay.

There are third parties providing consulting services and training, but anything involving the internals of the Application Server is inaccessible. Hardly surprisingly, software vendors use this leverage to their best advantage, making maintenance the most profitable portion of their businesses.

JEE Application Server Economics

The JEE Application Server vendors offer multiple levels of products with software Iicense list pricing/CPU varying from just under $5,000 to over $25,000. It is also common for these list prices to be heavily discounted during the purchase negotiations, particularly for large volume customers. Additionally, many major customers enter into Enterprise License Agreements (ELA) which provides them even more advantageous bulk pricing.

Read More

posted by avanabs on April 7, 2010 07:43 AM

One area that is getting a lot of attention in these days of "do more with less" is the cost of infrastructure maintenance. Many studies show that maintaining software is much more expensive over it's life cycle than purchasing/building it in the first place, so IT management is looking at these costs with renewed interest. The issue turns out to be a bit more complex than it originally appears, although one thing that leaps out is that all of the options for supporting Tomcat are far better than the options we all had with commercial JEE Application Servers. First, let's look at what we mean by "support". In this series of blogs, I'll be sharing some thoughts about the various supportions available for Tomcat, as well as contrasting those with the JEE commercial Application Server support situation.

Enterprise Application Server Support

While it is theoretically possible to forgo support entirely, and sometimes this is forced by software vendor failure or acquisition/product retirement, realistically IT organizations require ongoing support for their mission critical infrastructure. In this post, we will be discussing the various options available to IT organizations for supporting Tomcat environments. We will also be discussing the important differences between commercial proprietary closed source vendor JEE application server support and Apache Tomcat.

One of the most important and valuable “features” of Tomcat from the IT Operations point of view is support choice. Proprietary software can only be supported by the vendor, at that vendor’s monopolistic support pricing, while using Tomcat provides multiple viable options in a competitive support environment. Hardly surprisingly, excellent Tomcat support can therefore be obtained at much lower cost. That said, while Tomcat itself is “free”, there are real internal and external costs associated with using Tomcat as an IT infrastructure. It is important to understand these costs when comparing the various support options.

Read More