CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javatomcatweblogicweblogic-10.xapache-tomee
quantum
quantum

Reputation: 3039

Replacing Weblogic with Tomcat?

I am investigating replacing Weblogic 10.x with Apache Tomcat for dev machines and I'd appreciate any insight or recommendations anyone may have.

The reason for replacement is probably known to anybody ever trying to do dev work on a production webapp server monstrosity - to improve dev efficiency. The application is large (several million lines of code), legacy codebase, containing a smorgasbord of technologies (Struts, EJB 2, EJB 3, to name a few) and changes to codebase frequently entail doing a redeploy/restart of web server (even with JRebel) - which takes a long time (to the tune of 5-10 minutes). That obviously wastes time, introduces frustrations and leads to mistakes.

What I'd like to know is - is it even tenable contemplating this replacement? The codebase would later on in dev pipeline be validated against a geniune WL instance but for the dev machines, I'd like it to be as lean as possible. This obviously won't be a trivial transition but I'd hate spiking a week on something that's completely impossible or, at least, absolutely inadvisable.

So obviously I'd need something implementing JavaEE spec (doesn't need to be officially validated - as long as it works :) ), so I've looked at possibilites and, to me, Apache TomEE looks promising. Geronimo is long dead, seems like, Glassfish is in limbo (?) and Jonas an unknown. Working under Java 8 would be a BIG plus (which TomEE 1.7 seems to support).

Lastly, we don't work with XA transactions (two-phased commits), so supporting that at least won't be necessary.

Is this a reasonable approach? Is there an alternative I am missing? Any experience doing the transition? Any thoughts are welcome.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3496

Answers (1)

user1676004
user1676004

Reputation: 66

long-time TomEE user here. We have been using TomEE in production for the past 3 years. We started off with bigger SOA on version 1.7 (Java EE 6) and a year ago upgraded to TomEE 7 (Java EE 7) for microservices.

Our stack is Kotlin, JAX-RS, CDI, JSON-B, BVal, mybatis for db (pgsql and db2), elasticsearch, hazelcast, kafka, akka-stream-kafka and akka. TomEE makes for a nice, small application server. On startup and initial garbage collection I think it runs around 30m heap usage (or less). We are starting to run Docker on Kubernetes.

WildFly has some cool stuff happening and seems like they are more active, and obviously they have a huge corporate company behind it.

We concur and run the setup that Adam Bien espouses, which is not going uberjar due to the size of docker images, transferring 128M containers vs smaller 5-20M, running on a full application server.

I've tried out WildFly Swarm, it's cool, and there is also a hollow-jar deployment where instead of a fatjar, you can deploy a war (meecrowave also supports this and I think Payara micro too).

I would put TomEE, WildFly (and Swarm), and Payara on my list of app servers to use to stick with Java EE route. If you consider a different direction, prepare to wade through a ton of information, articles, blogs, etc. Akka-HTTP? Play? Scala? Spring Boot, which just runs on netty/tomcat/etc? vert.x?

So many players out there to choose from. Find one that you like and works. For us right now that is TomEE.

Upvotes: 5

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