GlassFish or Tomcat: Which is Right for You?

GlassFish is the open source application server delivered by the GlassFish Community, which was launched by Sun in 2005 and has proven to be extremely popular among developers. There are two prevalent versions today: GlassFish v2, and the newly released Glassfish v3 Prelude. Nearly 9,000,000 copies of GlassFish v2 have been downloaded to date, with 300,000 product registrations in 2009 alone. GlassFish v3 Prelude offers new features and enhancements. It is an excellent platform for deploying rich Internet applications backed by Java or dynamic languages such as jRuby.
While GlassFish is a collection of Java EE containers, one of which is a Web container, Tomcat is just a Web container. This crucial difference leads to some major advantages for GlassFish.

The Tomcat app server was launched by Apache by a group that included Sun and JServ developers; the initial code drop came from Sun. Tomcat was critical to the early adoption of server-side Java, was available under an open source license, and contributed to the popularity of open source software within large enterprises.

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