Resin Server

Resin Server

Resin is a web server and Java application server from Caucho Technology. Resin is provided in two versions, Resin Professional and Resin Open Source (GPL). Resin supports the Java EE standard as well as a mod_php/PHP like engine called Quercus.

Resin Open Source is an open source version of the open core Resin Professional version that Caucho describes as "suitable for hobbyists, developers, and low traffic websites that do not need the performance and reliability enhancements of Resin Professional."

There is some debate on whether or not Resin Open Source is crippleware or open core. March 2013, Techempower, independently picked Resin Open Source as the fastest open source application server, and then used Resin Open Source to compare Java web framework speed against non-Java web framework speed. Resin Open Source dominated the first five positions of every test. Being the best of breed implementation open source solution given a large open source competition would indicate that Resin is not in fact crippled, and is in fact an open core implementation, which implies what is released is useable, but additional features come with the non-open source version. Open core means an open source version of the proprietary version has been made available, and licensed in a manner that donates it to the software community at large for partial or complete re-use.

Resin Open Source lacks optimizations such as built-in caching and features such as clustering support, advanced administration, and the health system that includes HTTP session replication, Java Monitoring, distributed cache replication, and JMS queue replication. Many of these same features are lacking from Apache Tomcat, and Apache Tomcat is not deemed crippleware. While Caucho describes these as "features and enhancements commonly needed in a production environment", Resin Open Source is used without these features.

Within the "resin-admin" web-based management interface of Resin Open Source the majority of menu options return the message "This feature requires Resin Professional and a valid license. Please download Resin Professional and request a free evaluation license." when chosen. Setting many configuration file options and accessing many API methods do not work and generate log error messages to the same effect. Yet Resin Open Source was still useable enough to beat Apache httpd at serving files and independently picked by Techmepower to represent all Java web frameworks, and ran all of the most popular Java web frameworks on top of Resin Open Source due to its speed, including, Spring, Grails, JRuby, Wicket, and Tapestry, which showed that Java still has the highest overall throughput for web application development.

Resin market share might be small in the grand scheme of Java Application Servers, but many high traffic sites use Resin, including Toronto Stock Exchange, SalesForce.com, Condé Nast (parent company of Vogue, GQ), CNET. NetCraft's February 2012 Survey states Resin grew to 4,700,000 sites and Resin is used on a number of the Million Busiest Sites. Resin was the only Java-based web server mentioned in NetCraft's survey.

Caucho claims that Resin Pro and Resin Open Source is faster than Apache httpd (v 2.4), and therefore focuses on competing with nginx web server. Caucho claims Resin to have comparable speeds to nginx, and that this is one of the reasons for Resin's strong growth. Caucho now claims that Resin Pro is faster than NginX.

Although a Java based server, key pieces of Resin's core networking are written in highly optimized C. Caucho claims Java is the layer that allows Resin to be "full featured" while C provides the speed.

Resin, which was released in 1999, predates Apache Tomcat, and is one of the oldest application servers and web servers.