JavaEE Application Server or Lightweight Container?

Question

Let me preface this by saying this is not an actual situation of mine but I'm asking this question more for my own knowledge and to get other people's inputs here.

I've used both Spring and EJB3/JBoss, and for the smaller types of applications I've built, Spring (+Tomcat when needed) has been much simpler to use. However, when scaling up to larger applications that require things like load balancing and clustering, is Spring still a viable solution? Or is it time to turn to a solution like EJB3/JBoss when you start to get big enough to need that? I'm not sure if I've scoped the problem well enough to get a good answer, so please let me know.

Thanks, Jeff

Answer 1

Tomcat can be clustered.

Load balancing is usually a hardware solution (e.g., a BigIP or Cisco ACE) that's independent of app server.

Spring can be enterprise, just like EJB. There's no dividing line that says Spring can't handle it.

Answer 2

I could say that in our project which quite large (~500K LOC) we've got rid of JBoss in favour of Spring/Tomcat for a performance sake.

One of J2EE Application container (and JBoss, as an implementation) key features is a possibility of transparent distributed transactions among different kind of transactional resources. That is great idea and it simplifies coordination of, let's say, JMS messenging and database operations a lot. But when it comes to a necessity of high throughout it becomes a problem. Unfortunately, distributed transactions are notable for its slow speed.

It isn't an easy task to migrate from JBoss to Spring, however it's possible and Spring/Tomcat could be considered, with quite rare exceptions, as fully functional replacement for JBoss.