Jetty, Tomcat, Nginx, Geronimo, Glassfish: I'm confused

tomcat glassfish nginx jetty application-server
parsa picture parsa · Jan 17, 2011 · Viewed 22.3k times · Source

As someone new to the Java EE ecosystem, I'm confused with these products which share a tremendous amount of keywords. And half of them come from Apache software foundation.

Can someone address me with a brief distinctive explanation for each of them?

Answer

Jon Martin Solaas picture Jon Martin Solaas · Jan 18, 2011

Jetty and Tomcat are web-containers, while Geronimo, Glassfish and JBoss support the whole J2EE stack (more or less). And, tataaa, they use/include Tomcat or Jetty for web-containers. The most important part of a fullblown J2EE server besides the web-container used to be the EJB-container allowing for deployment of EJBs, having them run in a transactional context etc. Today, J2EE is actually called Java EE. Entity EJBs (JPA) can run outside the EJB-container, say in Tomcat, but then outside the transaction handling that an EJB-container would provide.

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