There's so much wrong with this article. First of all, two ideas are artificially intertwined: (1) paying for an app server and (2) using an app server. JBoss is open source just like Tomcat. You can pay RedHat for JBoss support, and you can pay SpringSource (and, for that matter, others) for Tomcat support. Given how expensive Weblogic and Websphere are coupled with how incredibly good JBoss is, you would be hard-pressed to justify writing checks to IBM or Oracle. If you want support, use JBoss and write a check for 1/10 as much. Their support actually kicks ass.<p>"Use Spring, and you don’t need an EJB-compliant container."<p>Huh? Does JdbcTemplate now count as a suitable replacement for a transacted ORM? Perhaps the author is referring to Spring's wrappers around other ORMs like Hibernate?<p>" Manageability is super important, but all I want to know is: 1) Is the server up; 2) is my end-user performance acceptable; 3) has my fault-tolerant architecture kicked-in to solve either problem?"<p>The open source version of tomcat his shitty management features. If you want even reasonable manageability, you'll have to pay for SpringSource's TC server or something similar.<p>"has my fault-tolerant architecture kicked-in"<p>What fault-tolerant architecture? Tomcat's clustered session replication?<p>"I highly recommend elastic caching platforms (ECP) since it is a technology that is independent of the application server and super-fast. "<p>You know who makes a really good open source one? JBoss :) And, it's transactional! But, you need a transaction manager if you want to do 2PC with your DB. And, guess what doesn't come with a TM? That's right, Tomcat.<p>"I question even the need for a container. Seriously, why can’t Java web applications just run on the operating system like the containerless Microsoft .NET applications? "<p>[Note that I don't know a darned thing about .NET, so I'm speculating a bit] Ummmm...in this case, isn't Windows acting as the container? So, if I create a Linux distro with Java/JBoss included, does this satisfy his need?<p>"The next generation is elastic application platforms (EAP) that are containerless."<p>What's up with this obsession about "containerless" platforms? Isn't this like saying, "I want a platform, but I don't want it to be a platform"? The whole idea of a platform/container/framework is that someone else handles a bunch of cross-cutting concerns for you so that you can concentrate on the business-y aspects of your app. Servlets are much more convenient than binding to a socket and serving up HTTP by processing incoming byte streams. Furthermore, how can any of these in-the-cloud offerings be containerless?
I'm not sure what I think of the article: many of the points being made didn't make sense to me. But I WILL say that I work for a major bank and we run 100% of our web applications on Tomcat. And it works great. The more expensive options (including JBoss which costs us money based on our contracts with RedHat) offer extra features, but they're not features we want or need.