Red Hat and SpringSource square up on Tomcat

Enterprise-tough

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Developer, 3rd December 2008 02:23 GMT

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Red Hat and SpringSource are squaring up on enterprise Servlet containers, both pressing Apache's Tomcat into action.

SpringSource Tuesday announced its tc Server, billed as a version of Tomcat "hardened" for enterprise use and coupled with mission-critical operational capacities and support.

SpringSource tc Server is the company's latest offering to target the enterprise and featuring a commitment to "mission-critical" service level agreements (SLAs).

The company did not reveal what its SLAs are, but claimed it's able to provide a high level of service and support thanks to the fact many of the Tomcat committers are SpringSource employees. SpringSource claimed its employees are responsible for 80 per cent of Tomcat commits.

Other tc Server features include "advanced server and application diagnostics," SpringSource said.

The SpringSource launch follows last month's release of JBoss Web 2.1.1 for developer feedback by Red Hat. Sacha Labourey, Red Hat middleware's chief technology officer, described JBoss Web as "JBoss Tomcat++" or "our customized version of Tomcat."

Red Hat has taken a more technology centric approach, it seems.

Features include the addition of native libraries for Apache APR and OpenSSL, and advanced event-driven Servlet API including non-blocking I/O.

"The idea was to provide an optimized binary including everything our users need and 'sanitized' to remove anything we think they shouldn't be using," Labourey blogged.

Joss Web 2.1.1 will be the web container for JBoss Application Server 5.0, which has yet to see the light of day. Labourey in July promised a release candidate for the delayed application server, followed by a further release candidate "in six or seven weeks" with the final version to "follow closely after." ®

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