JBOSS is a J2EE application server which supports EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) and JMS related stuff.
If all you are doing is servlet/JSP, Tomcat is all you need. Tomcat is a pure servlet engine, with no EJB.
Tomcat 5 supports newer JSP/Servlet versions, and using JSTL/EL is much easier than the older JSP versions. In 2011, Tomcat 7 is nearing release.
- January 11, 2011 - Tomcat 7.0.6 was released as stable! - Final release scheduled for summer of 2011.
For just building web stuff such as jsp and servlets, Tomcat is just fine.
JBOSS has a pluggable architecture, and can use Tomcat as it's servlet container. It is well integrated.
A simple web app, with no j2ee features should deploy easily on any compliant servlet container, although an app may not strictly need an app server, some war files (like for http://www.jenkins-ci.org) can be run directly without needing tomcat. This has some advantages, as tomcat can sometimes produce a very noisy set of logs.
Tomcat is sometimes run behind Apache web server, or IIS web server.
Sources
- http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=25337
- Porting an app from tomcat to jboss - http://seamframework.org/Community/JBossVsTomcatReviewForOthersToRead
- feels like I have to write much more useless code for JBoss Seam than tomcat
- someone else says they did such a port and "didn't have to change a line of code"
- http://www.coderanch.com/t/89977/JBoss/tomcat-vs-jboss