Java Container Popularity and a Prediction
Jan 3rd, 2011 by sharps
Hey, 3 days into the New Year and my second blog post !
Another day, another survey – this one from Tools Vendor ZeroTurnaround. From what I can tell survey participants were self-selected – but the results underline what has been a solid trend over the last several years and I’ve seen the same in internal surveys I’ve commissioned.
Below is the 2009 / 2010 Container Popularity chart. Note the significant decline of Websphere and Weblogic and the growth in leaner, Open Source containers like JBoss, Jetty and Tomcat.
Glassfish bucked this trend – likely due to uncertainty about it’s future under it’s new owner Oracle. JBoss showed only a little growth – I’ll put this down to a fairly slow year in 2010. But 2011 is going to be very, very different. We already have a Java EE 6 Web Profile container (released last week) and JBoss AS 7 is taking shape pretty rapidly. With our increased attention to slimming the footprint and increasing the speed of adopting new technology and standards like Java EE 6 — my prediction is that JBoss will catch or overtake Tomcat in the next year.
That’s going to be hard since there is a Tomcat running for each JBoss. Sorry, JBossWeb
Why do you include JBoss with your list of growing “leaner” containers? It’s still much bulkier than Tomcat or Jetty, relatively slow and painful to redeploy (I have been using JBoss 6 milestones) and its market share is basically stagnant.
I think the real trend here is the movement away from full J2EE/JEE implementations towards lightweight containers like Tomcat and Jetty. Those two increase their joint market share from 34% to 41%. Not too shabby. It’s also not clear if SpringSource’s flavor of Tomcat (TC Server) goes under “Tomcat” or “Other”.
I agree with “Chris w” that the trend is away from full stack Java EE containers. The container model restricts programmers and they don’t make the server management really easier. It is better to have a thin container like Tomcat or Jetty and use the libs that are actually needed.
JSR 196 (http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=196) is a good a example for the container horror! What a pain to implement an authentication module compared to something like Spring Security or a simple Servlet Filter.
I think the trend in containers will be “lean by default- beefed up when needed” so that an appservers starts up really quick with minimal services and only activates services (EJB, JMS etc) when stuff is deployed to it that require those services. Nobody cares if the binaries take up 5 or 200M.
@Nik – accepted – I should have said overtake “Standalone Tomcat”
@Chris While Jetty / Tomcat are much leaner than JBoss (after all JBoss AS includes Tomcat) once you layer Spring, Terracotta, etc. on top they start to bulk up a fair bit.
@Nik – nice term “lean by default…” – that describes JBoss AS 7 well