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Open source Java projects: TomEE

Scale to enterprise with the Java EE 6 Web container built on Tomcat

By Steven Haines, JavaWorld.com, 07/10/12

Apache TomEE aims to provide application developers with a best-of-breed technology stack that can be deployed to a simple and lightweight Java EE container. In this return to the Open source Java projects series, author Steven Haines introduces TomEE, explains how it differs from Tomcat, and helps you set it up in your development environment. He then walks through the process of configuring TomEE to integrate resources such as database connection pools and JMS destinations -- bread and butter for today's enterprise apps.

Tomcat is a popular choice among lightweight, open source application servers, but for developers seeking a more enterprise-ready app server, the options have been mostly commercial. With TomEE, Apache hopes to change all that -- and then some. In this installment in the Open source Java projects series, I'll go under the hood of TomEE to explain how it differs from plain old Tomcat. You'll also have the opportunity to meet TomEE (pronounced "Tommy") hands-on, with a deep-dive review of what is required to configure TomEE to host your application. Since the main benefit of using TomEE over Tomcat is its support for enterprise technologies, I'll show you how to configure various types of resources, as well as the process to wire those resources into your application.

About TomEE

You might recognize TomEE from its parent project, OpenEJB. TomEE started out as the integration of Tomcat with OpenEJB, but that definition proved too narrow. As explained on the TomEE homepage, EJB itself is an expansive specification, including support for most of the Java specs used in enterprise Java development today. But TomEE builds on top of OpenEJB's integration with JMS, Web services, connectors, Servlets, JPA, JDBC, and Java Transactions and Security, adding support for ActiveMQ, CXF, MyFaces, and OpenJPA.

In evolving TomEE to be Tomcat plus Java Enterprise Edition, TomEE's open source development team worked with three key design principles:

• Don't mess with Tomcat
• Keep it simple
• Avoid architectural overhead

The goal was to add enterprise features to Tomcat without incurring additional runtime requirements or startup time for larger applications. Based on recently published benchmarks for TomEE 1.0, it looks like they succeeded. The following statistics compare the start times of applications in TomEE versus other deployment environments:

• Rails 3.3 Custom (44mb WAR): 21.3% of beta2 startup time (369% faster)
• Lift/Scala sample app (23mb WAR): 43.8% of beta2 startup time (128% faster)
• Confluence 3.5.5 (149mb unpacked): 37.6% of beta2 startup time (166% faster)

TomEE and TomEE Plus

It's no secret that the Java EE technology stack is very large. This poses a variety of challenges, but can make it especially difficult for non-commercial vendors like Apache, that cannot necessarily afford the infrastructure overhead of implementing a full-stack Java EE application. So, with Java 6, the JCP introduced Java EE certification profiles.

As of this writing there are two classifications of certification: Java EE 6 Full Profile and Java EE 6 Web Profile. Commercial Java EE app servers like Oracle Application Server, Oracle WebLogic, and IBM WebSphere, as well as the open source JBoss and Glassfish application servers, are fully certified. TomEE is currently Java EE 6 certified only against the web profile. This means that TomEE supports a subset of the Java EE specifications that particularly apply to Java web development, namely: CDI, EJB, JPA, JSF, JSP, JSTL, JTA, Servlet API, JavaMail, and Bean Validation.