The largest Java stack market shares are held by Red Hat and JBoss. Although stack components vary, the use of Java code is consistent. Performance and development differ drastically, however. Red Hat stack uses the Linux Tomcat server and is fully configurable using XML configuration files. Because servlets are compiled into JARs, they offer information hiding and a performance benefit that scripted technologies don't have. MySQL works well in a web application. MySQL scales well for particular (that is, read-only) web applications, but lacks DBMS functionality.

JBoss web server blends an enterprise application resource (EAR) server and a web server into a single product. It also uses the Tomcat server but the database is not specified. JBoss applications use the Hibernate persistence manager. Applications are written once and deployed anywhere. The J2EE standard provides many enterprise-level components such as transactions and pooling.