J2EE

The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) defines the standard for developing multi-tier enterprise applications.

The J2EE 1.4 platform introduces new APIs which implement core Web services protocols stack. It also introduces new Management and Deployment APIs, new versions of the JavaServer Pages, Enterprise JavaBeans, and Connector APIs, along with other features which establish J2EE 1.4 technology as a premier Web services and enterprise application intergration platform.

Tomcat

Tomcat is a free, open-source implementation of Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies developed under the Jakarta project at the Apache Software Foundation. Tomcat is available for commercial use under the ASF license from the Apache web site in both binary and source versions.

At ZZICT, we use Tomcat as our primary servlet runner, both for development as for production setups. We feel there is no reason to use any of the (sometimes quite expensive) servlet runners other than company strategy level considerations.

ZZICTs Java services

ZZICT also provides development of custom webservices using J2EE.

J2EE vs Zope

Both techonologies offer a fairly complete set of building blocks for web services, although for most web services, J2EE tends to be somewhat more heavy weight. We at ZZICT typically decide for each project what the choice of technology is for the problem at hand.

But the preliminary tendencies are clear: Zope tends to be more light-weight and faster (in development time) than J2EE for everything except for very large and complex projects.

Community

The main site for the Tomcat community is jakarta.apache.org.