Apache Tomcat 7 has been released

posted by mthomas on June 29, 2010 04:55 AM

A little under 18 months since work started on Tomcat 7 I am delighted to be able to say that the first Tomcat 7 release, Tomcat 7.0.0 beta, is now available from the Tomcat 7 download page at the Apache Software Foundation.

In addition to the implementation of the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and EL 2.2 specifications, Tomcat 7 boasts a number of new features. These include:

• memory leak prevention and detection
• protection against session fixation attacks
• a simple filter to add cross-site request forgery protection to an application
• simplified embedding
• alias support
• better security for the Manager and Host Manager applications
• and lots of internal code clean-up

The memory leak prevention I previously blogged about was found to be so useful in early testing it was back-ported to Tomcat 6 before Tomcat 7 has been released. It has been great to see this new feature help users identify memory leaks in both their own applications and in a number of third party libraries (log4j, Commons Lang, Spring Batch to name a few).

I have been speaking about Tomcat 7 at a number of conferences and a recurring question has been "That looks great. What's next?". Those of you that track the Tomcat developers mailing list and the open issues in Bugzilla, may have noticed a steady downwards trend in the number of open bugs across all Tomcat versions. My main focus now the first release is out will be on keeping the number of open bugs low and getting to the first stable release. What that means for Tomcat 7 is more frequent releases. I am currently expecting to produce a release every 4 weeks or so with the aim of continuing the downward trend in both the number of open bugs and the time taken to resolve a bug once it has been raised.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing about a number of the new Tomcat 7 features in more detail, starting with aliases. For now, however, I am heading off to raise a glass to celebrate the release of Apache Tomcat 7.0.0.

Mark Thomas is a Senior Software Engineer for the SpringSource Division of VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW). Mark has been using and developing Tomcat for over six years. He first got involved in the development of Tomcat when he needed better control over the SSL configuration than was available at the time. After fixing that first bug, he started working his way through the remaining Tomcat bugs and is still going. Along the way Mark has become a Tomcat committer and PMC member, volunteered to be the Tomcat 4 & 7 release manager, created the Tomcat security pages, become a member of the ASF and joined the Apache Security Committee. He also helps maintain the ASF's Bugzilla instances. Mark has a MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.