Running Apache Geronimo in production

Question

If you're running Apache Geronimo in production why did you choose it over other application servers and what are your experiences with running Geronimo in production?

Can you also please share what servlet engine you decided to use (Tomcat/Jetty) and why you made this decision?

UPDATE: So far this question got two up-votes and one star but no answer. I'm starting to wonder, is anyone using Apache Geronimo at all? My logic would be, if you use Geronimo for development you'd also use it for deployment. Right? So, does that mean that no one is using Geronimo at all?

Answer 1

We definitely use Geronimo in production!

We have used the Tomcat version since 1.0, about four years ago as I recall. We are currently running mostly 2.1.1.4.

One of our apps gets about 1 million page views per day. The others are nowhere near that, but they are important apps that need to work well.

Our choice was based primarily on:

1. Price: At the time our company started using Java, we weren't sure what we needed out of an app server. So we decided to start at free and work our way up, if needed.
2. Basic features: I had experience with WebSphere (base/ND) and plain old Tomcat. Geronimo had the J2EE features we wanted, all within a lightweight package.
3. Open Source: Our primary client that we use Java for required Open Source.
4. Familiarity: Being an Apache-based server, we were already comfortable with Tomcat, OpenJPA, Axis web services, and others. Furthermore, we were comfortable with the Apache community as far as bug tracking and other minor things.
5. Support: We expected to be mostly on our own, but knowing that the Apache community was active was important. As was the availability of commercial support from IBM, as we are an IBM Business Partner.

Our experience has been great overall. The servers are very reliable. I search our logs once in awhile and sometimes see weird errors with a database connection, an EJB call, but those are pretty rare (and quite possibly our code's fault).

Performance is impressive. I joke that we could run Geronimo from my laptop and the clients wouldn't see a difference. Give it any decent server and it will purr along for months.

I'm not sure how many people actual run Geronimo. I'm rather confused about that. I've seen slides (years ago) that listed some big names like eBay using it. The mailing list is active but sometimes seems like only the Geronimo team communicating with each other.

The only serious bug I've run into is this one. It is a big deal to us, but of course Geronimo is free and I don't expect them to fix bugs that are important just to me.

I've been meaning to check out Apache TomEE server, wondering if it is more actively or openly used. Just to see how the community and usage compares to Geronimo.

Answer 2

WebSphere community edition is Geronimo. So IBM chose it as a platform of choice.

When choosing an application server, you're really choosing the APIs you want to use in your application and maybe the administration interface (but you only use that once in a while).