Tomcat或JBoss for JSF，Hibernate项目

Question

I am working on academic project, which is supposed to be as small as possible without useless features, covering only its initial requirements, which also are not too broad.
Two main technologies, which I have chosen to work with is JavaServer Faces 2 (probably with CDI) and Hibernate. I don't need anything more.
I need some server to deploy my application on. My first thought was Tomcat, but as far I know it only serves Java Servlets API and JSP.
My question is which of the following solutions are better, easier to develop and less troublemaking in cooperation with my small project?

1. Use Tomcat and try to extend it with JSF and Hibernate libraries
2. Use JBoss Application Server

The reason that I haven't chosen JBoss first is that I have no experience with it at all. Till know, I worked only with Tomcat. I have also wondered if it isn't shooting from cannon to mosquito.
Please help mi with decision.

Answer 1

If you have no other constraints, use Tomcat. It's open source and free. JSF works perfectly well with it. I don't know about CDI, but there doesn't seem to be any reason not to use Tomcat.

If, however, you require functionality which is in JBoss (advanced security features for example) but not in Tomcat, then use that.

Personally, I'd just go for the simple solution (ie Tomcat) and only if necessary switch to JBoss. If you write code for Tomcat, in general it will work with JBoss, but not necessarily the other way around, because JBoss has more functionality.

Answer 2

IMO NetBeans + Glassfish combination is more suitable for beginners b/c of tight integration and stability.

Oracle is targeting this combination specifically for educational purposes to promote JavaEE, so there are lots of tutorials and samples that work right away.

If using EclipseLink instead of Hibernate would be OK for your project, of course...