SpringSource has released the next generation of their Apache Tomcat-based offering, SpringSource TC Server Spring Edition. TC Server Spring Edition is the first SpringSource software to be made available through VMWare channels. SpringSource, long a leading contributor to Tomcat, has taken Tomcat's leading capabilities as a web container and enhanced it with monitoring and cloud capabilities as well as integration with SpringSource's SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) Eclipse offering. The new server offering provides tools for both developers and operations managers.
Operations will find TC Server Spring Edition appealing because it provides support for monitoring and provisioning applications. TC Server Spring Edition supports many different dashboards designed to let operations monitor the health and behavior of the server. If more functionality is needed, Hyperic provides a readily-integrated superset of features. TC Server Spring Edition provides a feature called templates wherein you can save the configuration of a given server instance and the applications in it and use that as the base of a new instance. Second, TC Server Spring Edition provides good integration with VMWare Lab Manager and VMWare Workstation to deploy and debug easily in a virtualized environment. Above that, the management capabilities exposed by the server are accessible using a secure API, which conjunction with VMWare virtual machines and templates means your environment can be as flexible and resilient as you want it to be, in a completely automated way.
Developers will find TC Server Spring Edition useful because it ships with Spring 3.0 or 2.5 preloaded and has support for running Spring applications (as well as frameworks built on Spring, like Grails and Spring Integration). TC Server Spring Edition integrates out of the box with STS. STS provides a dashboard (Spring Insight) that provides metrics on the nature of a running application, measuring crucial numbers like transactions and exceptions, automatically.
TC Server Spring Edition is free for developers. The standard edition SpringSource TC Server which is a useful for all applications, whether they're running on Tomcat or other JEE servers is priced at US $500 per CPU. The TC Server Spring Edition is priced at US $750 per CPU.