What is the difference between Tomcat, JBoss and Glassfish?

java tomcat jboss glassfish enterprise
samoz picture samoz · Sep 29, 2010 · Viewed 305.9k times · Source

I am starting to look into Enterprise Java and the book I am following mentions that it will use JBoss. Netbeans ships with Glassfish. I have used Tomcat in the past.

What are the differences between these three programs?

Answer

Petar Minchev picture Petar Minchev · Sep 29, 2010

Tomcat is just a servlet container, i.e. it implements only the servlets and JSP specification. Glassfish and JBoss are full Java EE servers (including stuff like EJB, JMS, ...), with Glassfish being the reference implementation of the latest Java EE 6 stack, but JBoss in 2010 was not fully supporting it yet.

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