Please help me decide if I should use tomcat over jserv for a major site

[Gareth Coltman <ga...@majorband.co.uk>]

Hi,

I am trying to architect a site for a major client, moving from a Microsoft
to a Java platform. I have been using Tomcat / Turbine for developing small
internal applications for some time, and have been very impressed with the
setup.

This client however gets a lot of hits, and have up two 200 concurrent
users.  They are unconvinced that Tomcat is really up to production
standard.  I have trawled lots of mailing lists and seen conflicting views -
some people say that it is a solid product, but the Jakarta project imply
that only release 4 will be production ready. Personally I have never had
any problems, but have never had used it on such a scale.

The other major question I have is whether to run Tomcat as standalone, or
with Apache - we will need load balancing, so I assume I have to run it with
Apache. However, this statement by the jakarta group worries me:

"While the code for Tomcat 4.0 running in standalone mode is
considered to
be near production quality, the web connector to run behind Apache
is still
alpha quality code, with limited functionality.  It is likely that
there will be
interim updates of the web connector software in between beta
releases of the
entire Tomat 4.0 package."

The alternative of course is JServ, and I am fairly sure that this will work
OK with Turbine.

Is there anybody out there how can help me convince my client to use Tomcat?
;)

Gareth Coltman