Apache Tomcat

Easy to use, easy to setup, highly scalable, fast, and robust.

I've been using Tomcat in production web sites for more than five years now, and I really can't complain. It's solid.

I'm mostly a sysadmin, and I've never been a Java programmer, so my perspective is a little different...

It's definitely robust and seems to work well at what it does.

But the documentation and the configuration files both suck!

Want to do something typical: no need to read the docs at all, and no need to change the configuration: the defaults are pretty good for most cases.

Need to do something unusual? Good luck! It's probably possible, but it's certainly hard.

The syntax for the majority of configuration files is XML, which simply sucks for editing by hand. Great for computers talking to computers, but terrible once a human needs to deal with it directly.

And the docs. Ugh. At least the docs for the configs are "Ugh". Organized by the XML hierarchy! With no examples!

But seriously, I hate when I have to deal with tomcat, but it's still better than most of the other choices out there for hosting JSP applications. The Java developers that don't have to deal with more "interesting" configurations all seem to love it, even.

I'm using Tomcat in production since it's release 3.2 (sad time).

We now use Tomcat 6.x and never got a single problem with Tomcat/catalina. Errors occured in applications, JDBC drivers, even JVMs but never in the servlet engine :)

Highly recommanded

constant use, there is nothing better