On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Mark H. Wood <mw...@iupui.edu> wrote:
> It's probably worth asking what "full-fledged enterprise applications" > means. I'm not aware of any specification with that title. Mark, you are right - there is no specification named "full-fledged enterprise JEE server". There is only one JEE specification (well few different versions, e.g. JEE5, JEE6, JEE7 see links below), and other related specifications (EJB, Servlet, etc...) What I meant is that - historically, Tomcat implemented only a subset of functionalities of a JEE application server. Namely, Tomcat implemented the Servlet specification (e.g. Servlet 2.4, 2.5, 3.0, 3.1... ) - whereas, "full-fledged JEE appservers" had to implement the entire stack of APIs that were part of that JEE specification. Dan provided some great discussion points and summary on comparing Spring and JEE. If you search online, you will probably find a lot of heated discussion which one is better, do they complement each other, how they compare, how they differ, etc... Bottom line, Spring framework is used by many and it makes it easier to develop enterprise applications. Similarly, JEE (JEE5, JEE6, JEE7) is used by many, and now, it makes it easier to develop enterprise applications, finally (compared to previous J2EE implementations). Historically, one of the main complaints when developing applications was the server startup time on developer machines. Tomcat has traditionally been very quick to startup, whereas (old) JEE servers took forever to startup (I am looking at you WebSphere :) which caused major grief redeploying, restarting, and managing appservers in development. Any change would take forever to restart and test. Of course, that's been long fixed now - JBoss/Wildfly, Glassfish, WebSphere (Liberty), etc... they all have significantly reduced appserver startup time. Please ask - if you have specific questions. Links: [1] JEE5 - https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=244 [2] JEE6 - https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=316 [3] JEE7 - https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=342
