I have used the basic Fedora 8 install to run a tomcat system. I chose that because it gives me a clean slate to start with and I'm pretty happy with that. It works reasonably well, but I did find uploading to the server really slow. If possible, get the server to pull down what it needs rather than trying to send packages/installs etc to it. On the basic (low end) platform performance is reasonable and it's easy to switch up to a faster system and try it out.
If you're not super happy with command line administration, it's probably a good idea to set up a windowing environment (ie choose an image that has a desktop manager configured), or use a Windows image and Remote Desktop to it.
I'm not aware of any ratings systems for the available images.