Glassfish or Wildfly add value when the application uses JavaEE APIs. With a Tomcat or Dropwizard approach you have to piece together a bunch of 3rd party JARs

Glassfish or Wildfly add value when the application uses JavaEE APIs. With a Tomcat or Dropwizard approach you have to piece together a bunch of 3rd party JARs to provide these APIs. You have to maintain this etc. With the app server the libraries are already bundled in there. Sure there may be more then you end up using but come one we are talking 10s of MBs here which in this day and age is nothing for most environments. Also startup times with these App servers aren't affected because they only startup the containers which are used by your application. My Glassfish instances start up in around 2ms with an app that uses JPA, Servlet, JAX-RS, EJB. I'd rather spend my time building the app and not spend time piecing together my Tomcat environment.