java - What is the difference between Tomcat, JBoss and Glassfish?

Question

I am starting to look into Enterprise Java and the book I am following mentions that it will use JBoss. Netbeans ships with Glassfish. I have used Tomcat in the past.

What are the differences between these three programs?

Answer 1

Tomcat is just a servlet container, i.e. it implements only the servlets and JSP specification. Glassfish and JBoss are full Java EE servers (including stuff like EJB, JMS, ...), with Glassfish being the reference implementation of the latest Java EE 6 stack, but JBoss in 2010 was not fully supporting it yet.