[lug] Tomcat ready for prime time?

[Mark (Andy) Jolley]

At my office we're really starting to play with Java beans, jsp's and stuff.
Unfortunately we seem to be going through a process where decision can't be
made about a platform.  To be fair to the execs, our current vendor just
cranked it's price from $15,000 per processor to $50,000 per processor (no
my finger didn't spasm over the 0).  We currently have stuff on IIS with
MTS, but are moving to the JAVA world, so we would like to find a decent
JAVA app server and are seriously considering Tomcat combined with Struts
due to the obvious price concerns above.  We're planning to use the IIS plug
in for Tomcat (so that we can still use some of our IIS apps) on a cluster
of IIS boxes and then connect to a cluster of Tomcat boxes, probably on RH
7.0 or 7.1 through a hardware load balancer, specifically a RadWare WSD.
The server platform we're looking at is server class Compaq stuff, DL360's
and up.

Now I'm a Linux-not-quite-newbie.  What I mean is I've dabbled with it
enough to setup IPChains and MASQ at home for a simple firewall to my
SprintBBD connection, but I haven't built anything like a secure webserver
with it.

Well my question is, is Tomcat 3.2.3 really ready for prime time?  We're
planning to deploy Mutual Fund trading, and other large apps on  a java
platform, and I want to make sure that it'll work well. I just want to avoid
the application-server-du-jour that we seem to be heading towards - IIS, the
really expensive one, and tomcat.  I'm really just fishing for any tips,
praise, nightmares, or gotchas that anyone has found with Tomcat 3.2.3 on RH
7.0 or 7.1.  Also if anyone has run into any weird tweaks that have to be
made when migrating objects into tomcat, or does the java compliant stuff
slide in pretty easily.

Thanks
Andy Jolley