posted by mthomas on May 13, 2013 05:10 AM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.40.

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Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages and Java Expression Language technologies.

This release contains a security fix and a number of bug fixes and improvements compared to version 7.0.39. The notable changes include:

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posted by Stacey Schneider on May 6, 2013 11:16 AM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 6.0.37 stable.

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Apache Tomcat 6.0.37 is primarily a security and bug fix release. All users of older versions of the Tomcat 6.0 family should upgrade to 6.0.37.

Note that is version has 4 zip binaries: a generic one and three bundled with Tomcat native binaries for different CPU architectures.

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posted by mthomas on March 28, 2013 06:33 AM

It is late on a Friday afternoon, and your web application has stopped responding to requests. The server is still reachable, and the Apache Tomcat process is still running–there are no errors in the logs. You want to go home but you can’t until it is fixed. What do you do?

If your answer is “restart Tomcat and hope it stays up until Monday,” then this article is for you.

Rather than keeping your fingers crossed and hoping you don’t get an angry call from your boss over the weekend, this article will provide you with some simple steps you can take to diagnose the problem. 

Step 1: What is Tomcat Doing? Thread Dumps Begin to Answer the Question

If the Tomcat process is running, then it must be doing something. The question is what is it doing when it should be responding to requests? The way to answer that question is with a thread dump–actually, a series of thread dumps. You need to take three thread dumps roughly 10 seconds apart and then compare them. I always compare them with a diff tool rather than by eye—a it is far too easy to miss subtle but important differences between the dumps.

How you generate a thread dump depends on your operating system and how you are running Tomcat. On Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris etc. use kill -3 to trigger a thread dump. On Windows use CTRL-BREAK if Tomcat is running in a console window. If Tomcat is running as a service, then the service wrapper should provide a way to trigger a thread dump. Commons Daemon (the service wrapper that ships with Tomcat) provides an option to trigger a thread dump via the system tray icon.

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posted by Stacey Schneider on March 27, 2013 07:39 AM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.39.

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Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

This release contains a number of bug fixes and improvements compared to version 7.0.37. The notable changes include:

• There have been multiple improvements in the bytes to/from characters conversion process. The core conversion process has been refactored to use the NIO APIs. This has resulted in a number of improvements including invalid UTF-8 byte sequences at the end of a series of bytes now trigger a conversion error rather than being silently swallowed. Errors detected in request URIs will be replaced with the replacement character (allowing the application to respond to the invalid URI as it wishes) and errors in request bodies will trigger an IOException. The use of the JVM provided UTF-8 decoder has been replaced by a better UTF-8 decoder derived from Apache Harmony. This improved decoder has earlier detection of error conditions and more closely follows the Unicode specification regarding the use of replacement characters.
• The annotation scanning process now provides more information if the scan fails due to broken class dependencies. There is now enough information to identify the class(es) at fault. The JAR scanning process that supports annotation scanning has also seen multiple improvements and fixes includingthe exclusion by default of the Bootstrap class path from the scan.
• Upgraded a number of Tomcat's dependencies including Commons Daemon to 1.0.14, Commons IO to 2.4 and Commons FileUpload to r1458500. A new dependency on Commons Codec was added to replace Tomcat's internal Base64 encoder/decoder.

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posted by mthomas on February 28, 2013 10:19 AM

ApacheCon North America is almost concluding, and my experience this year has not disappointed. It’s been great to be able to meet up with lots of other project committers. Many committers make the trek to ApacheCon wherever it is in the world and, given that we normally work together just via the project mailing lists, it has been great to be able to discuss current issues and new ideas face to face. Of course, all of these discussions will be making their way (if they aren't there already) to the Tomcat dev mailing list so the everyone in the community can participate.

Personally, I have spent a great deal of my time in presentations. I have spoken about progress on Tomcat 8, delivered another session on clustering and two on security covering vulnerabilities and security response at the ASF. As always, slides are available from http://people.apache.org/~markt and there should be video and audio recordings available as well at some point. Most sessions were reasonably well attended and the conversation and questions flowed after the presentations. Here are some of the questions and answers I found most interesting:

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posted by Stacey Schneider on February 18, 2013 01:06 PM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.37.

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Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

This release contains a small number of bug fixes and improvements compared to version 7.0.35. The notable changes include:

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posted by mthomas on January 30, 2013 09:08 AM

There has been some discussion on various forums and mailing lists about the End of Life for Java 6 and what it means for Apache Tomcat users. In response to these questions, we have put together this article that aims to summarize the key questions and give you some of the background and answers you need to plan how to best handle this transition in your deployments.

Here is a quick summary: If you want to run a supported version of Java—one with updates for bugs and security issues—then you will need to upgrade to Java 7. If this isn’t an option, you will have to purchase some form of support contract. Generally, upgrading to Java 7 will be the better long term option but the right decision for your business will depend on your circumstances.

What about Tomcat and Java—where are the risks?

For every Tomcat release, the formal build and testing is performed on the latest release of the minimum Java version required by the relevant specification. That means that the Tomcat 6 releases are built and tested with the latest Java 5 update and that the Tomcat 7 releases are built with the latest Java 6 update. There are also several continuous integration systems building and testing Tomcat with a variety of Java versions as well as all the local testing that the committers perform. In addition to all of this testing, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) runs a number of services on Apache Tomcat—again using a variety of Java versions including the ASF Jira instance that runs on Java 7 and Tomcat 7. While I can recall several issues with running Tomcat on older, unsupported Java versions, I cannot recall a single reported problem that was traced to running Tomcat on a newer version of Java. Running Tomcat 6 or Tomcat 7 on Java 7 is very low risk.

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posted by Stacey Schneider on January 16, 2013 01:06 PM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.35.

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Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

This release contains a small number of bug fixes and improvements compared to version 7.0.34. The notable changes include:

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posted by Stacey Schneider on December 12, 2012 09:10 AM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.34.

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Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

This release contains a small number of bug fixes and improvements compared to version 7.0.33. The notable changes include:

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posted by duncwinn on December 4, 2012 01:33 PM

People are still discovering the benefits of the free tool from VMware SpringSource, called Spring Insight Developer. This post provides an explanation of what Spring Insight Developer does, how to set it up with Apache Tomcat, and an example of available plugins.  For a better visual, there is also a video of the new Spring Insight 1.8.3 GUI embedded below.

Spring Insight is an extremely useful, time-saving, free tool for Spring developers and also has plugins for Grails, GemFire, Hadoop, Hibernate, JMS, JNDI, LDAP, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, Spring Batch, Spring Integration, Tomcat, and many more on Github.  In the latest release of Spring Insight, VMware introduced a new "split-agent" architecture that will enable this tool to be extended to more runtime languages besides Java, such as .NET, Ruby, PHP, Python, etc. There is also a bounty program where you can get paid to develop new plugin or offer to pay others.

What does Spring Insight Do?

In a nutshell, Spring Insight Developer lets you see what your code is doing. When, as a developer, you press a button in your application’s GUI, you can see what Java code is invoked, how it translates into SQL, and quite a bit more. Before we show it in action, it’s worth mentioning a few of the benefits.

• As mentioned, it’s free, and it’s also quite easy to download, set-up, and understand.
• Since Spring Insight uses AspectJ and AOP to load-time weave your application, you do not have to make any changes to your application code to use Spring Insight.
• It helps you code, test, troubleshoot, and iterate more quickly through development efforts.
• As you might expect, it also helps reduce project risk, makes applications more reliable, helps avoid releasing problem code into production, and makes troubleshooting production problems much easier.
• It works with Spring Insight Operations (read about the differences here) and vFabric Application Performance Manager within the vFabric Suite so that you can get the same view of code in a test, production, or other “live” system. For DevOps, this means we are all looking at the same information about application performance and problematic code.
• There are other benefits, like a plug-in based architecture, and you can read more about the approach to the “split-agent” architecture (i.e. how Spring Insight Operations works) in this article.

Let’s take a look at a simple example of tracing your app, viewing the details, and seeing the code in action.

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