One of the joys of launching a new product is that you get to watch near real-time feedback on your product releases on twitter, blogosphere and other social media sites. Our launch of MuleSoft Tcat Server was no different – people are tweeting and commenting on blogs. In addition to the social media, we also had people contact us with questions and suggestions.
One question we received is how are you different from other “enterprise Tomcat” offerings? Here are some differences that we think make MuleSoft Tcat Server stand out:
1.Vanilla Apache Tomcat – we made zero changes to core Apache Tomcat – we do not think Apache Tomcat is broken, and don’t feel compelled to recompile or add classes to the core Tomcat distribution. We added our code on top of binary Tomcat distribution to provide the value add. This means that Tcat Server is 100% plug-compatible with existing applications that work in Tomcat, and there is zero vendor lock-in for our customers.
2.Tomcat specific diagnostics – We did not retrofit a general purpose monitoring solution – we realized early enough in the product development that trying to use a general purpose monitoring solution (like a Big 4 solution) to do Tomcat diagnostics is like fitting a square peg into a round hole. Instead, MuleSoft Tcat Server includes advanced Tomcat diagnostics capabilities that allow developers and administrators to drill deep into the performance data and logs (e.g., application logs, catalina logs) to diagnose and resolve problems.
3.Advanced application provisioning capabilities – MuleSoft Tcat Server has the ability to group together multiple WAR files and treat them as a deployable unit. You can deploy a group of applications to one server or a server group. This dramatically reduces the time spent by administrators manually deploying multiple files to multiple server instances.
4.Simplicity – All through the development, we used simplicity as a measuring stick – as we were thinking of building new features, we asked ourselves, would that make the product more complex to use, if so, we decided against the feature.
But, don’t take our word for it. The best way to compare and contrast MuleSoft Tcat Server against other products is to download it and try it yourself! I’ll remind you that it’s completely free to use in your development environment.
Thank you for tweets, comments and emails – keep them coming. Also, if you want to reach the team directly, email us at tcat at mulesoft dot com.
