MuleSoft, formerly MuleSource, today launched the public beta of the MuleSoft Tcat Server. MuleSoft Tcat Server leverages core technology that made its Mule ESB the world’s most widely deployed open source integration platform. Tcat Server is a fully supported web application server, based on Apache Tomcat. It was created to help IT administrators and operations professionals save time and money managing their mission-critical business applications. The server’s enterprise-class functionality allows IT teams to migrate from heavyweight legacy platforms — such as Oracle WebLogic or IBM WebSphere — to the lightweight open source option, Tomcat. Features for the new product, accessible via Tcat Server’s administration console, include: * Application provisioning – deploy applications to server instances and groups with minimal risk and downtime. * Server group administration – manage multiple instances of Tomcat from a centralized location, eliminating tedious, error-prone manual work. * Performance monitoring and diagnostics – analyze Tomcat applications, and pinpoint the root-cause of trouble for faster resolutions. With this product release, MuleSoft is responding to customer and community needs – over 65% of Mule ESB users are running Mule ESB in or alongside a Tomcat environment. Mulesoft CEO Greg Schott explains, “With Tcat Server, MuleSoft is upending the status quo and sounding a death-knell for bloated legacy infrastructure software. We’re helping IT organizations to migrate to the lighter weight and less costly alternative they want, Tomcat, without losing the enterprise capabilities and support that they require.� MuleSoft offers customers world-class support services for both Tcat Server and Apache Tomcat. Recent customer satisfaction surveys confirmed a 91% satisfaction rate with MuleSoft support services, and a 0% dissatisfaction rate. Jason Brittain, author of Tomcat: the Definitive Guide, recently joined the staff at MuleSoft as an architect. Brittain says, “It is well-known that Apache Tomcat is a high performance web server and servlet container, which is very stable even for the largest of web sites. Yet stock Tomcat lacks enterprise features and support that administrators really need for production use. I am excited to have joined MuleSoft, knowing that our Tcat Server meets these needs and makes Tomcat even more attractive from an operations perspective.� For product info, or to download and review Tcat Server Beta, visit: www.mulesoft.com

Looks like "whatever SpringSource can do and get bought for, we can do also". Still, interesting times. How many Tomcat committers do Mulesoft have?

Hi Billy, You're not suggesting this is a copy-cat :) The a big driver for Tcat is that we have a large Mule user base where 65% use Tomcat and Mule together directly or are deployed in the same infrastructure, so it is a natural progression of our product offering. Furthermore, we see there is an under-served market for enterprise capabilities for Tomcat. The absence of these features make it difficult for certain types of deployments to shift from WAS/WLS due to the lack of provisioning, monitoring and diagnostic tooling available for Tomcat. I should stress that we're not looking to build yet another app server - I think that market is already well-served - what we are doing is giving people who develop on Tomcat the option to deploy to production with enterprise capabilities similar to commercial application servers. Cheers, Ross Mason MuleSoft

... lack of provisioning, monitoring and diagnostic tooling available for Tomcat.

Well, you always have MessAdmin! :-) I have to agree with a previous comment here, some of MuleSoft's monitoring capabilities look more than inspired from LambdaProbe... which is actually a good thing, as LambaProbe is/was a pretty good product.

.I have to agree with a previous comment here, some of MuleSoft's monitoring capabilities look more than inspired from LambdaProbe... which is actually a good thing, as LambaProbe is/was a pretty good product.

Looking over agent.jar and console.jar, and comparing to Lamba's probe.war, there does look like a lot of very similar stuff, but packaged differently, eg

agent.jar: 2528 Mon Aug 31 15:57:14 EDT 2009 WEB-INF/classes/com/mulesoft/tcat/monitoring/tomcat/controllers/AjaxReloadContextController.class 2643 Mon Aug 31 15:57:14 EDT 2009 WEB-INF/classes/com/mulesoft/tcat/monitoring/tomcat/controllers/AjaxToggleContextController.class 2402 Mon Aug 31 15:57:14 EDT 2009 WEB-INF/classes/com/mulesoft/tcat/monitoring/tomcat/controllers/BeanToXmlController.class 3405 Mon Aug 31 15:57:14 EDT 2009 WEB-INF/classes/com/mulesoft/tcat/monitoring/tomcat/controllers/DecoratorController.class

probe.war: 1937 Tue Nov 28 08:42:10 EST 2006 WEB-INF/classes/org/jstripe/tomcat/probe/controllers/AjaxReloadContextController.class 2353 Tue Nov 28 08:42:10 EST 2006 WEB-INF/classes/org/jstripe/tomcat/probe/controllers/AjaxToggleContextController.class 2358 Tue Nov 28 08:42:10 EST 2006 WEB-INF/classes/org/jstripe/tomcat/probe/controllers/BeanToXmlController.class 3200 Tue Nov 28 08:42:10 EST 2006 WEB-INF/classes/org/jstripe/tomcat/probe/controllers/DecoratorController.class

I know that there's a fork of Lambda out (Psi-Probe), so maybe having MuleSoft also use this code will benefit both... Still curious about the GPL stuff though...

What happened to Saturn and Galaxy product lines? Regards, Nikita Ivanov GridGain - Cloud Development Platform

... as a followup: Isn't Mule's Management Console is a private-labeled Hyperic that is a Spring product that's offering identical tc server? Can someone from Mule clarify that please? Thanks in advance, Nikita Ivanov. GridGain - Cloud Development Platform

Nikita, Tcat is completely separate from Hyperic. We built Tcat in house with a focus on simplicity and ease of use; neither of which I'd use to describe Hyperic. The focus for Hyperic is very different, its about broad platform support. Tcat has been written specifically for Apache Tomcat and provides a deep view into the server and applications as well as the ability to manage Tomcat servers and application provisioning. Cheers, Ross Mason MuleSoft

Thanks for clarification, Ross. Good luck! Nikita Ivanov. GridGain - Cloud Development Platform

Looks like MuleSoft's pretty basic monitoring capabilities are a copy of a old (but largely dead) open source project. http://blogs.mulesoft.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/blog3.jpg http://www.lambdaprobe.org/d/screenshots/full/memory.png I do not think the original project every claimed to perform "root cause" analysis of application as it is capabilities are largely confined to just the HTTP entry points. This [http] is a small part of the technology stack in any enterprise application and I doubt the data collection approach (large metric based) would help with real-world diagnosis except for the obvious low hanging fruit (jvm memory settings). That said what is being offered by MuleSoft is somewhat better than what was offered by Hyperic but that is not saying much when you consider that Hyperic was mainly used to monitor at a process level for health monitoring purposes. It is amazing that after so many years since Borland/Inprise offered extended monitoring and management capabilities to an custom Apache Tomcat distribution we still have vendors such as Mulesoft and SpringSource doing likewise to "combat the fight against bloatware". This fight seems to be a never ending story. Looking forward to future announcement regarding an alternative to the eventual bloatware offered up by SS/VMware, Mulesoft, ....., ;-) William

I've been playing with this for while now, and while portions of it do seem to have another open source project heritage (what doesn't, these days..that's a primary value of OS), there is also lots here that is new. I'd also note that this apparently doesn't require a proprietary/modified Tomcat, unlike the Borland solution you mentioned. Forcing a proprietary Tomcat on all those who've already leveraged Tomcat by creating customized versions for their specific IT environments simply doesn't work. As a long time enterprise software developer/architect and one of the ex-BEA'ers who constantly argued against the "force everything on everyone" bloatware battle, I'd also have to state that for most large enterprises the administrative capabilities of WLS or WAS are very very important. High among these is the ability to manage distributed logical groups of servers in a centralized automated way. My clients using Tomcat have had to do this completely manually, invent solutions themselves, or purchase wildly expensive generic applications management solutions. So, I personally applaud MuleSoft's combining distributed application management and monitoring, and I look forward to seeing where they take this as it evolves.

Andy are you saying that you can use any Tomcat version with the extensions they have provided? If not can you then please explain what you mean by "proprietary/modified Tomcat, unlike the Borland". The documentation states that MuleSoft Tcat Server is 100% “plug-compatible�. Does that not also imply a proprietary distribution in some form of another? If you are going to offer a custom distribution I would expect basic monitoring capabilities. I am not arguing this point. I am questioning how you can honestly market this as "root cause analysis" with such high level metrics largely confined to entry point monitoring outside of a Petstore like application.

Purchase wildly expensive generic applications management solutions.

With regard to "wildy expensive" you (or your customers) are obviously talking to the wrong companies. HP? IBM? BMC? CA? On the point of being "generic" I would argue this as a desired quality of any solution assuming this is equates to (correlates with) extensibility and applicability. Why would anyone want to have multiple different instrumentation & monitoring solutions for each application server platform or proprietary middleware when you have a solution that can effectively do it all and at a much less cost with consistency in modeling and analysis? "Here is a green mgmt console for Spring dm, here is our red mgmt console for JBoss, here is our yellow mgmt console for Tomcat, here is our..." All different versions all disjointed models and not in anyway correlated or aggregated. Yikes.

Does that not also imply a proprietary distribution in some form of another?

Hi William, Tcat includes official Apache binary distribution and adds enterprise capabilities for deployment and diagnostics. Tcat is free for use in development environments, so feel free to download it. Best Regards, Sateesh

Looks like MuleSoft's pretty basic monitoring capabilities are a copy of a old (but largely dead) open source project.

http://blogs.mulesoft.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/blog3.jpg

http://www.lambdaprobe.org/d/screenshots/full/memory.png

Well, they can't be using LambdaProbe because that is GPL. Which means that Tcat Server would be a derivative work and all of Tcat Server would need to be GPL as well. But it sure does look like the old LambdaProbe screenshots...

Hi Jim, I know it’s fun digging for these sorts of things, but skeletons here :) MuleSoft OEM'd LamdaProbe from its creator under a commercial license. There is no GPL code in Tcat. Ross Mason MuleSoft

Hi Jim,

I know it’s fun digging for these sorts of things, but skeletons here :) MuleSoft OEM'd LamdaProbe from its creator under a commercial license. There is no GPL code in Tcat.

Ross Mason
MuleSoft

Cool beans. I know a bunch of people tried connecting w/ the LP folks (including the Psi Probe people) and had no luck; glad you guys were able to get ahold of them and an OEM license before they went dark.

Make no mistakes here, folks. There's only basic resemblance of LambdaProbe, but Tcat brought well above and beyond the original scope. E.g. Lambda has never supported remote server monitoring & management, neither did it support multiple servers (all provided by Tcat Server). HTH, Andrew

How does it compare to SpringSource tc server?

How does it compare to SpringSource tc server?

Hi, I shared my thoughts on how Tcat Server is differentiated from other offerings in the market on our blog here: http://blogs.mulesoft.org/2009/09/so-how-are-we-different-from-other-enterprise-tomcat-offerings/ HTH Sateesh http://www.mulesoft.com/