Guus Bosman

Today I've been working a nice Java project, just for fun. It's been quite a while since I had time to do that; I've been quite busy the last few weekends.

I looked into a feature of the new Tomcat, a servlet container that I often use at my work. I've been working with version 5 for a while now, but one of the new things I didn't try yet was clustering. This is a mechanism to provide more up-time and better scalability in a web-application.

Today I set up a few instances of Tomcat at my desktop, and experimented with and read about the clustering and load balancing features of this open source server.

I found two nice articles on OnJava.com about this ([1], [2]) that were very helpful to provide a quick start. The experiment went quite well; the hardest aspect was to configure a multicasting IP address.

It's nice to see 'little' Tomcat start to support features that its bigger brothers have had for a long time. However, I feel that it's mainly useful for testing purposes and as a development tool. If your website is big enough to warrant clustering, you'd probably want to go for a commercial tool such as WebSphere or WebLogic, if only for the support contract.