tc Server is a Web application server based on open-source Apache Tomcat. It preserves the best of Tomcat and adds many mission-critical operational capabilities that are unavailable in the open-source product. tc Server harnesses the power of traditional JEE architectures and eliminates their complexity and performance drawbacks, making it easier, faster, and more cost-effective to build and run cloud-ready applications. With its lean architecture and small memory footprint, tc Server requires significantly fewer resources than conventional servers, which allows for greater server density in virtual and cloud environments.
Usability Enhancements to Apache Tomcat
The tc Server runtime component, known as tc Runtime, offers usability advantages that make it easier, faster, and more flexible to configure and operate than Apache Tomcat.
tc Runtime includes the following usability enhancements:
- Improved out-of-the-box configuration. In most cases, you can use tc Server immediately after you install it, with no additional configuration.
- Easy creation of a tc Runtime instance with the
tcservercommand script. You can leverage additional (optional) configuration features by specifying prepackaged or custom templates when you create a tc Runtime instance, such as automatically configuring clustering or SSL. - Easy and intuitive startup of a tc Runtime instance on both UNIX and Windows platforms.
Available tc Server Packages
To get tc Server downloads, see Obtaining tc Server.
Available Packages:
- VMware tc Server <major-version> Core - Our core tc Server installation package. Developer and Standard editions are available under this product tile.
- VMware tc Server <major-version> Runtimes - Our available tc Runtimes (Apache Tomcat) version updates that can be added to the tc Server Core installation.
- VMware tc Server <major-version> Templates - Our On-demand templates that can be added to the templates collection within the VMware tc Server Core installation.
tc Server Editions
tc Server is available in two different editions. tc Server Developer is geared towards the enterprise application developer. tc Server Standard is geared for operators and administrators.
Historically there was a significant difference between standard and developer editions. However, in 5.0.x, the only difference is that the manager app is installed in an instance when created by default in developer edition and has to be added as a template in standard. The use of developer edition is deprecated and will no longer be provided in future releases of tc Server.
The following sections describe the tc Server editions:
Developer Edition
The Developer Edition of tc Server is geared towards the application developer. The developer edition is intended for local developer and trials of tc Server and should not be used in production environments.
tc Server Developer Edition includes Tomcat Web Application Manager, a web application you can use to deploy and manage tc Runtime applications.
The Developer Edition is distributed as either a ZIP or compressed TAR file with the following names:
- vmware-tc-server-developer-version.tar.gz
- vmware-tc-server-developer-version.zip
Standard Edition
The Standard Edition of tc Server is for administrators and operators. Similarly to the Developer Edition, the Standard Edition contains the tc Runtime, scripts to easily create and start tc Runtime instances, and templates to quickly create specific types of tc Runtime instances (such as cluster-node ready or SSL-enabled).
The Standard Edition is distributed as either a ZIP or compressed TAR file with the following names:
- vmware-tc-server-standard-version.RELEASE.tar.gz
- vmware-tc-server-standard-version.RELEASE.zip
tc Server Standard Edition is also available as an RPM for customers installing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Related Documentation
Because tc Runtime is based on Apache Tomcat, much information about the tc Runtime itself is provided by Apache. See the following documentation:
The following links provide additional documentation for programmers developing Web applications using the Spring Framework and standard Java EE technologies such as servlets and JSPs:
