I have an assignment that requires exposing a web service to 3rd party vendor based web application. I have the choice of server platform (between the 2 mentioned below) on which to deploy the web service. Should I deploy on tomcat 6 vs websphere 6.1.
I want to developed JAX-WS compliance web services in this case (with all the annotation support etc.)
My main concern – which of these two server platforms will scale my web service better – for example today the load might only be 300 transactions a second but it could increase 3-4 times in very near future..
I have an assignment that requires exposing a web service to 3rd party vendor
Share
This is probably something you will have to figure out for yourself by doing some load testing against both servers (if you already have them installed). Performance issues will always be dependant on how you have coded your web service and what resources are utilised (e.g. database, jms, etc).
A well tuned Tomcat server will perform just as well as a well tuned Websphere server because it’s just a JVM under the hood. Keep in mind that Websphere provides a full J2EE stack, it will provide you with access to J2EE functionality that Tomcat does not provide (e.g. EJB) which is only a servlet container.
As long as you write your web service in a portable manner, you will be able to migrate between Tomcat or Websphere or ServerX in the future if that is what is required. Portability can be achieved by using a framework like Spring, with remote services so that you’re not tied in to using a particular vendor’s stack.
If you already have investment in Websphere servers I would continue to use them. If you are starting from scratch, why not begin with Tomcat (it’s free!). Should you run into perfomance issues you’ll have to look into using a load balanced solution and both servers can support this configuration.