Hi Blake
There are possibly several reasons for you choose GlassFish that may be
of benefit here - its hard to list every feature here but I will cover
some. A few broad brush benefits you will see fairly quickly are as
follows (without knowing about your specific use case beyond what you
have stated in your email)
1. GlassFish comes with a command line utility called asadmin that
provides a rich set of management and configuration commands to enable
you to use a non-GUI mode to manage your installation spanning several
machines.
2. GlassFish comes with an easy-to-use Administration GUI console that
covers most, if not all, functionalities of the asadmin command line
interface - the GUI provides you a browser based approach to manage
server instances in an administration domain beyond a single compute node.
3. One can cluster multiple instances and have a deployment targeted to
the cluster with one CLI command or a click on the Admin GUI console.
These instances can be located on a network of machines.
With an SSH Daemon enabled on each machine, the creation, installation
and runtime lifecycle management of these instances can be done through
the domain administration server seamlessly.
4. One can front the cluster instances with a software or hardware load
balancer to support both a url for user traffic access to your
application(s) and balancing high traffic loads to your site thus
providing service availability and scalability
6. One can enable replication while deploying (availability-enabled flag
or check box) and get the advantages of making the conversational
session state highly available for your web sessions (and EJB should you
ever need to go there) thus going beyond service availability to user
session availability.
7. Several security features from supporting ssl for encryption to
supporting security realms for your applications.
I am sure I am missing some other major features but this is hopefully a
good start.
The above is not exhaustive and we would welcome you to try the server
out and give us feedback based on your experience and for improvements.
-Shreedhar
On 4/5/13 11:05 AM, Blake McBride wrote:
> I understand that GlassFish offers support for technologies that
> Tomcat does not (EJB, I think, comes to mind). However, I am not
> using those additional technologies, and that difference doesn't
> matter to me at this time. Tomcat has been working well for me for
> several years now. The reason I am interested in GlassFish is
> because, I believe, GlassFish scales better, and perhaps easier, in
> large installations. So, my question is this, is GlassFish better
> positioned to support large installations, such as more than one
> physical computer, serving up a single URL?
>
> Also, what other areas of GlassFish might be reason for me to switch?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Blake McBride
>