posted by fhanik on April 23, 2012 10:22 PM

With the 7.0.27 release the Apache Tomcat team introduced a WebSocket implementation. WebSocket has received a lot of hype, and has been much anticipated by Tomcat users. Let’s take a quick look at what web sockets are, what benefits and limitations they have and how they are implemented in Apache Tomcat 7.

What is a WebSocket?

WebSocket is considered the next step in evolution of web communication. Over time, communication has evolved in steps to reduce the time and data throughput for the application to update a user’s browser. The evolution has looked a little like this:

• Entire page reloads
• Component reloads using AJAX Processing
• Comet communication
  • Long poll– similar to AJAX, but not holding a thread on the server
  • Bi directional- two way communication over the same TCP

Each of these steps had their benefits and challenges. Apache Tomcat 6 implements bi-directional communication over HTTP using its Comet Processor. This implementation allowed for asynchronous event driven request processing as well as bi-directional communication. This implementation had a few limitations.

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posted by jfullam on March 20, 2012 04:32 PM

Working software is the primary measure of progress for software development teams. This is one of the principles of the Agile Manifesto and has led agile software teams to focus on implementing the most important features of a system early and efficiently. These teams usually provide frequent deployments of the software in order to receive feature validation from the business and to show project progress. The benefits are quick and frequent feedback for the developers and congruous applications for the business.

The practice of automated continuous deployment ensures that the latest checked in code is deployed, running, and accessible to various roles within an organization. Project managers can have a place to check on project progress, testers have a view into the latest builds, developers can see the their modules working with the modules from other team members, and stakeholders can see how their requirements have been translated into working software. As some of the most popular application servers to deploy agile applications on, Apache Tomcat and tc Sserver easily integrate with continuous integration servers to allow agile teams to realize continuous deployment while utilizing a lean application server (another practice of agile teams).

You can start practicing continuous deployment very quickly using Apache Tomcat or VMware vFabric tc Server, Jenkins, and your source control system of choice. For this article, since another tenet of agile development is to instrument the application early for better manageability, in addition to outlining how to set up continuous deployment with Tomcat, we will include alternative instructions for tc Server which has built-in monitoring from VMware vFabric Hyperic.

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