Tomcat vs. Geronimo

I talked in an earlier post about Java "word salad" and I still stand by it. It's only after playing with the various products that I finally understand the differences between Tomcat, Geronimo and Glassfish for example.

In plain English, Tomcat is a web and application server that implements a java servlet container.

Geronimo and Glassfish are the implementation of the Java EE platform by Apache and Sun respectively. Like Tomcat, Java EE servers need to provide the servlet feature. This can be accomplished by including Tomcat proper and this is indeed what Geronimo does for example. However, a Java EE server also needs to implement tons of other stuff too: transactions, EJB, JDBC, message queues, persistence, clustering, management beans and an internal SQL database to name a few.

Each set of features provided implements interfaces specified in the various java community specification documents. This means you can swap various features for others, e.g., Glassfish implements the JMS API using Sun's Java System Message Queue product, a.k.a OpenMQ, but Geronimo uses ActiveMQ. You could for example put ActiveMQ in GlassFish to gain additional features found in that product. That being said, you could also install ActiveMQ or OpenMQ standalone on additional servers to either complement your Java EE application servers or just for use as a standalone message queue.

Not all components found in these open source Java EE platforms are distinct however. The internal database found in both products is Apache Derby for example.