Advantages of deploying sling + jackrabbit on tomcat?

Question

There are several guides how to deploy Apache Sling on Apache Tomcat. Why would you want to do that? As I understand it, this would mean you are deploying the OSGI container Felix within tomcat, and thus use a deployment system quite different from Tomcat. Even more confusing: within Felix Sling uses Jetty as servlet engine - thus you are deploying a servlet engine within a servlet engine. 8-} So, what is the point of doing this, instead of just running the launchpad as a Java standalone application?

Answer 1

Some people want to deploy Sling on Tomcat or other servlet containers either because they have other applications that run there and they prefer having a unified setup, or because they are familiar with these containers in terms of monitoring, operations etc.

That's why we provide Sling both as a war file and self-contained runnable jar.

If you have no specific reason to use Tomcat or another servlet container, using the self-contained Sling runnable jar is probably best - it's lightweight, easy to install and provides the exact same features.