Hi,
We are trying to understand the advantages and disadvantages of having IIS as the web server?
What are the advantages if we choose tomcat as app server with IIS as the web server.
We have two environments right now, one that has just the tomcat stand-alone and the other: tomcat with IIS redirect.
We are wondering if we really need IIS redirect piece?
What would we loose if we just hit the reporting server directly?
Can someone kindly shed some light on this?
Thank you.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Tomcat is an application server, and thus will try to parse everything that comes through it as an (Java) application. As a consequence, it will try to parse images, javascript files, plain text documents, etc as such, which adds unnecessary overhead.

OTOH, IIS is a simple webserver, it's better at serving static content than Tomcat is. IIS isn't my favourite, but it serves the purpose and it's a combination supported by IBI.

In my opinion, IIS is not the single alternative. The Apache httpd server works very well with Tomcat, both being Apache projects. There is a connector to Tomcat, mod_jk, which let the web server and app server talk to each other.

Håkan

Thank you both for the explanation.
So,if I understand correctly, some companies opt to go with IIS because it serves better for static content.
If that is the case, I might not want to have IIS because we do not have that many applications anyway.
Also, I think we can incorporate this IIS piece anytime if we really need to, correct?
Thanks.

quote:

Originally posted by ReddyP:
Also, I think we can incorporate this IIS piece anytime if we really need to, correct?

Aye.

One of the benefits of the tomcat w/IIS configuration is that you can configure Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) and Single-SignOn (SSO). That way, assuming you are on a Windows server and using Internet Explorer, your user's user ID would be retrieved automatically and users would not need to enter credentials. This would be more secure and also reduce the chance of users sharing user IDs in MRE/RC, etc. If you're not interested in IWA/SSO then doing the tomcat standalone has less installation requirements and few moving pieces.

Thank you all for the valuable feedback.