The number of posts at Users @ GlassFish for November was 1359, which is our second-best number, after last month's 1480. This is pretty good as many US-based people traditionally take off the whole week of Thanksgiving. I was curious about how the mail activity would compare with that of Tomcat, so I went ahead and created charts for Tomcat-USERS (small chart at left, also see Large Chart) and Users@GF (Large Chart). Many disclaimers apply, and a true head-to-head comparison is not applicable, but the trend is very good.

Which Web services stack is integrated in GlassFish, TmaxSoft JEUS 6 and WebLogic Server 10, supported on JBoss, works on Tomcat 5.x, Jetty, Java SE, and now also work on Tomcat 6.x as well ? Metro is the answer and the list of containers keep growing. Metro can be easily installed on Tomcat 5.x using the installation script with the download bundle. An updated directory structure in Tomcat 6.x require a minor update to the script though.

Rama describes the change required to run JAX-WS samples on Tomcat 6.x. And my blog describes how to install Metro bundle on Tomcat 6.x to develop a Secure, Reliable and Transactional Web service endpoint. We will make these changes as part of the installation script so that you don't have to worry about version specific changes.

Let us know if you have tried Metro, or any of its component, on any other container.

There is a thread at the GlassFish Forum on doing deployment-specific WebApp Configuration with a mechanism similar to that of Context.xml in Tomcat. This was at least partially addressed by RFE 2439 and, to spread the word out, Amy just described the facility in some detail. The solution in GlassFish allows global configuration as well as per-virtual host configuration. Check it out and see if this works for your needs. If not, post on the forum/ email thread.

Covalent recently published some benchmark results on the scalability of 3 popular Servlet containers: Tomcat 6 using the native APR, Jetty and GlassFish. The results are good for the three, but they favor TC 6 when using a very large number of connections. One danger with performance tests is that is is really hard to make accurate comparisons, despite everybodies' best intentions. For example, inside Sun I've been involved in comparisons between the Web Server and GlassFish and the results are affected by details like how many requests, what response time, what percentage of successful responses, how much memory, what tuning parameters, etc. That is why there are organizations like SPEC and benchmarks like Web2005 and SPECjAppserver (and even those have their own issues).

The Covalent piece is doing a good job in that it is dispelling the myth that Servlet containers do not scale, because it is forcing teams to provide better out of the box performance (Java SE 6 did a great job there) and because I think everybody will be more careful measuring performance. I'd expect improvements on all these fronts in the near future, in the meantime, here are some additional pointers you may want to check out...

• AB Considered Harmful
• Configuring Grizzly for Performance: Part I, Part II
• Comments from Greg W regarding Jetty in that Covalent article.

Regarding the picture, I chose Mark Twain because (a) he popularized the phrase Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics and (b) he is such a great guy that we should have him somewhere in TheAquarium, but please do note that I am not saying that the covalent blog are lies! :-)

Roger (at Ninth Avenue Software) recently compared Tomcat and GlassFish in his blog - I think in part because FigBird runs on GlassFish. Since this is a popular topic, Jason Lee then proposed to push it to a more stable location at the GlassFish Wiki, now open for your contributions. I suspect that per-area product comparisons may be more manageable, so I created an umbrella page for it and the the WS Stack Comparison; feel free to add other comparisons.

Yet something else to work on in preparation for GlassFish v2 beta.

Wouter at AMIS Technology has a new blog entry explaining how to call from EJBs running on GlassFish from Tomcat using a recent GlassFish V2 build. The blog is fairly detailed and uses screenshots from NetBeans but it should work with any of the other IDEs that Support GlassFish and Tomcat (like MyEclipse and IDEA). I suspect a number of folks will be interested, so Check It Out!.

Ken and Jim are travelling to ApacheCon US next week to talk about GlassFish. They will host a booth, give out T-shirts (we should design a new T-shirt - maybe using CafePress), and Jim will be hosting a BOF Wednesday night at 8pm on GlassFish for Tomcat Users.

Jim has been involved in Tomcat since the early days, so this should be both informed and informative, and thanks to Ken for the tip.

This is short notice, but, this morning (9am US Pacific time) Kohsuke will present at the latest User Experience meeting. He will be discussing his recent experiences in Tool Automation on GlassFish vs Tomcat. Please consider attending, or following up on one of the email threads on this topic. Meeting logistics and future agendas are in the User Experience Wiki Page. We are still figuring out how to make these meetings as useful and practical as possible, so constructive feedback on that would be appreciated.