At last year’s BEA World, the conference formally known as eWorld, BEA announced the WebLogic Console for Tomcat. This add-in for the WebLogic console is finally here and I can’t wait to try it out. While I love WebLogic and use it for everything production, I do use Tomcat for some simple development tasks or quick POC applications that don’t require transactions or all of the bells-n-whistles of WebLogic.

The administration tools that ships with Tomcat leave a lot to be desired and so this will be a welcome invitation for anyone using Tomcat. The one sticking point is that it will require WebLogic and so this may only be a value-add for people using WebLogic. Since WebLogic developers licenses are free, anyone can download and use WebLogic but I’m not sure a lot of people will rush and download WebLogic, just to use the Tomcat admin console.

Most people that use Tomcat probably use or should really take a serious look at Tomcat Probe. Tomcat Probe is a web application, which is designed to dig into Tomcat internal objects to display invaluable runtime information about deployed applications and Tomcat instance in general. The list of features include:

• Display of deployed applications, their status, session count, session object count, context object count, datasource usage etc.
• Start, stop, restart, deploy and updeploy of applications
• Ability to view deployed JSP files
• Ability to compile all or selected JSP files at any time.
• Ability to pre-compile JSP files on application deployment.
• Display of list of sessions for a particular application
• Display of session attributes and their values for a particular application. Ability to remove session attributes.
• Ability to expire selected sessions
• Graphical display of datasource details including maximum number of connections, number of busy connections and configuration details
• Ability to reset data sources in case of applications leaking connection
• Display of system information including System.properties, memory usage bar and OS details
• Display of JK connector status including the list of requests pending execution
• Real-time connector usage charts and statistics.
• Ability to show information about log files and download selected files
• New! Ability to interrupt execution of “hang” requests without server restart

I understand (and applaud) BEA’s strategy of adoption of open-source tools, products and their commitment to open source software. In addition to supporting open-source initiatives, BEA has also contributed a lot of source-code and intellectual property to the open-source community as well. I know the strategy behind the WebLogic console for Tomcat is to up-convert people from Tomcat to WebLogic and make the migration process easier but the audience for this tool will be a very small and niche group. I guess I count myself in that small group and will install the Tomcat add-in for the WebLogic console – Can’t wait to see how it stacks up against Tomcat Probe.

BEA, WebLogic, Tomcat, weblogic+console, foss, open-source, tomcat+probe