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We have a web application that uses JSF 2.0, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL database. It is under development and soon will go into production. We might have to deploy some web services in the future (only a little chance and it would not be confirmed until we go into production).

We are considering Tomcat and JBoss EAP 6.1 Alpha for the production deployment. I have been reading that Tomcat is being used in Production extensively and there is not much dispute about it.

Interestingly, JBoss EAP 6.1 Alpha (the community supported version of JBoss) is NOT recommended for production. The recommendation is to go for the commercial version. Here is my thought process around making a decision between these two.

  1. Both are open source and community supported
  2. Both are free to use in production
  3. Both have been around for a while
  4. Both Apache and RedHat (on the community versions) do NOT provide support packages

If Tomcat works, why not JBoss EAP 6.1 Alpha would work? Is it simply that Tomcat is more mature than JBoss EAP 6?

NOTE: If there is no requirement (not cofirmed at the momemt though) for out of the box Web Services and JTA support, we would go with Tomcat with no second thoughts.

My question is why not JBoss EAP 6.1 Aplha while Tomcat 7 is ok?

PhantomReference
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  • community editions of JBoss are not recommended for production because RedHat does not provide a commercial support package for it. That's the biggest difference. – kostja Nov 27 '13 at 09:44
  • Does Apache provide support packages for Tomcat? – PhantomReference Nov 27 '13 at 09:46
  • No, but many others do: http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/SupportAndTraining – kostja Nov 27 '13 at 09:49
  • The word "alpha" should already be the answer for "why not to use it in production". Its an early access version, development on it is far from finished. Between that version and Jboss AS 7.2 / EAP 6.1 (full) there are literally hundreds of bugfixes. – Gimby Nov 27 '13 at 09:54
  • Thanks Gimby. If I change my question about using JBoss 7.1, what would be your comment about Tomcat 7 Vs JBoss 7.1 (I might miss some features, yet to look at what those would be, but I can live with those as long as it is reasonably stable)? – PhantomReference Nov 27 '13 at 10:00
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    Its like asking an opinion on a mosquito VS an elephant. Jboss 7.1 itself is useless, if you go for JBoss then download the latest tag of JBoss 7.2 and build it from source using the provided ANT build script. You can Google for instructions on how to do that. Both Tomcat 7 and JBoss 7.2+ are fine products and I use them both without issues. – Gimby Nov 27 '13 at 10:06
  • Are you using both of them in production? – PhantomReference Nov 27 '13 at 10:10
  • "In production" is a vague term; both of them are deploying applications that are used concurrently throughout the working day by many (120+) people, yes. – Gimby Nov 27 '13 at 10:13
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    @Gimby could you clarify the hundreds of bugfixes between alpha and final version? Is there a list somewhere? There wasn't much time in between them, so I wonder how many fixes were actually implemented. release notes lists [21 specific fixes](https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/JBoss_Enterprise_Application_Platform/6.1/html-single/6.1.0_Release_Notes/index.html#idp958320), not hundreds. – eis Nov 27 '13 at 10:14
  • 'Out-of-the box Web services' support is hardly a must-have. CXF is trivially easy to set up on Tomcat. JTA, though, is a tricky one. If you're trying to use transactions across multiple databases, you've got bigger problems than your choice of app server. – artbristol Nov 27 '13 at 10:38
  • @eis: Its a difficult discussion because its hard to define which version you're really talking about when you refer to an 'alpha'. When I think alpha, I think the community versions of JBoss 7.x that you can download, not the EAP builds which are actual release candidates and final builds. See here for someone who did some (shocking) counts: http://henk53.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/the-curious-case-of-jboss-as-7-1-2-and-7-1-3/ – Gimby Nov 27 '13 at 12:23
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    @Gimby umm.. there is only one specific version that was released as eap 6.1.alpha, the one on the [download page](http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/downloads/) released 2013-03-07. I think you're maybe messing up the concepts here? or maybe you mean that between 7.1.1 and eap 6.1 there were hundreds of fixes, like in that blog posting? – eis Nov 27 '13 at 12:34
  • You are probably correct. – Gimby Nov 27 '13 at 12:44

1 Answers1

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Disclaimer: this is just my view. I'm not affiliated with JBoss in any way.

I think the reason it is not recommended for production is the lack of support contract, nothing related to product as such. They say on the FAQ page that

The first EAP stage Alpha is of equivalent, or better, quality to a community Final release.

and

7.2.0.Final was always the basis for EAP 6.1.0.Alpha. Due to the new wide-availability of 6.1.0.Alpha, and for simplicity reasons, we've released just one release called EAP 6.1.0.Alpha.

So assuming community final releases can be used in production, I don't see any direct reason eap 6.1.alpha couldn't be used in production.

With a support contract however, you get support contacts and the bug fixes that have been made for this release. There are no bug fixes against eap 6.1.alpha as far as I know, but there already is EAP 6.1.1 release with some bug fixes. That's an important point to consider when you go to production.

Update: if you want to keep on using AS7 and go to production having the bug fixes, there is an option of building the EAP from sources. Quoting this message:

Essentially we give you three choices:

  1. Stick with community - You get always get the latest and greatest cutting edge stuff (including experimental features), but you have to get support from the community and update more frequently since the community really only focuses on the latest major + minor version.

  2. Buy an EAP subscription - You get all of the features above, which lead to minimizing the amount of work you need to spend on app server maintenance and support.

  3. Self build and support EAP - You get some of the benefits of the enterprise releases (e.g. patches to older major versions and so on), but you have to invest time and energy to build and maintain/verify your app server distribution bits.

Should anyone want to go with the third option, the sources are at ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/jbeap/

eis
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