SpringSource tc Server™
W H I T E P A P E R / 3
1. Building/Running Spring Applications on
SpringSource tc Server™
Many of us have had the frustrating experience of developing, testing, and tuning our Spring Applications,
only to be then faced with what can amount to a “port” to a dierent production environment, typically a
commercial JEE Application Server. To add to this frustration, we know that our application doesn’t require
90+ percent of the functionality (not to mention complexity and cost) of that JEE Application Server in the
first place, but we are aware that IT Operations management and monitoring capabilities are not found in our
lightweight desktop development environments. It is also increasingly common that the production application
will be hosted in a virtualized environment, which makes building, testing, and deploying on a common light
weight platform even more valuable.
We know that we will be faced with doing this over, and over, and over, again during the application life cycle
due to today’s business pressures to deliver incremental functionality (value) in the application on a frequent
basis. This cross environment switching- which at its core is primarily administrative- can add hours to an
otherwise simple deployment task. One large newspaper in the UK found that each cycle was taking them
multiple developer hours, mostly porting the complex configuration settings and deployment metadata, for
each update. Using Spring on tc Server reduced their update time to minutes, a dramatic savings, particularly
considering their aggressive agile application development methodology.
The advantages of Spring are well known, as are the advantages of Tomcat, so this white paper focuses
primarily on the advantages of combining the Spring Framework with SpringSource’s tc Server™ in order to
create a highly productive, reliable, enterprise ready, production environment for deploying today’s mission
critical JAVA applications. While it is definitely not required to use Spring and tc Server together, because
each operates just fine on their own, the combination does oer many additional benefits due to their natural
synergy and due to specific enhancements made to both the Spring Framework and to tc Server.
2. Widespread Adoption of Spring and Tomcat
The probability is that your organization has been using the Spring Framework for JAVA application
development for many of your critical IT projects. In the seven years since its introduction, Spring has become
very widely adopted, with over 3 million JAVA developers using Spring and 83 percent of the organizations
with large IT development teams leveraging the Spring Framework to streamline their development processes.
According to Evans Data, Spring is also used in over 50 percent of all applications running on the major JEE
Application Servers and on Apache Tomcat.
It is also highly likely that you are using Apache Tomcat, at least in the development phase. Tomcat is by far
the most widely utilized JAVA web applications server, in use at over 64 percent of all corporate enterprises.
While Tomcat is an excellent web applications server and widely used in developing applications that are later
deployed on JEE Application Servers, it has lacked some of the administrative, management, and monitoring
capabilities that IT organizations require, thus inhibiting its adoption in many production environments. To
resolve this problem, SpringSource has introduced tc Server, a commercially supported, production ready, web
applications server based on Apache Tomcat.
