[eeperson]

Looks like I should have read the Capsule Github page. I didn't realize Capsule was caching the project dependencies. I could certainly see that making projects much faster to deploy.

Aren't the app servers and the embedded servers the same servers just configured differently? Standalone it is configured with XML and and embedded it is configured with Java code. It doesn't seem to me like there is much of a set up difference.

As far as I can tell, it comes down who cares more about the settings for the server, the people who maintain the machines or the people who maintain the code. If those people are the same then it sounds like it really doesn't matter.

[pron]

Multi-app servers usually take much longer to launch, deploying apps and upgrading the servers is a pain, and there's a host of other issues (like not being able to easily allocate resources to apps according to their needs).

> As far as I can tell, it comes down who cares more about the settings for the server

There's a lot of truth to that. I think that the whole devops approach is that they should be the same people. Of course, you might have valid reasons for not subscribing to that approach.

[eeperson]

The difficulties you mention (aside from upgrading servers) is about the having multiple apps in a single server not standalone vs embedded. Although, if you are careful, it can actually be faster and easier to deploy to a multi-app server [0].

I grant you, upgrading servers can be more involved depending on how you do it.

[0] - http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/deployer-howto.html#...