posted by Stacey Schneider on February 22, 2012 10:48 AM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.26

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This release is primarily a bug fix release and includes numerous bug fixes compared to version 7.0.25. The notable bug fixes include:

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posted by dmikusa on January 23, 2012 03:14 PM

One of the new features with Tomcat 7 is a replacement to the commons-dbcp connection pool. While the commons-dbcp connection pool works fine for small or low traffic applications, it is known to have problems in highly concurrent environments (think multi-core/multi-cpu).

Fortunately, this is where the JDBC Connection Pool excels. It is a completely new connection pool which has been written from the ground up, with a focus on highly concurrent environments and performance.

Given its focus on high concurrency and performance, many users are finding that the JDBC Connection Pool can be great for use in a production environment. This article will discuss the features and options which make using the JDBC Connection Pool a great choice.

The Basics

Getting started with the JDBC Connection Pool is very simple. It was purposefully designed as a drop-in replacement for commons-dbcp and as such, if you've ever used commons-dbcp you'll be immediately familiar with the configuration for the JDBC Connection Pool.

This means the most existing commons-dbcp users can switch to the JDBC Connection Pool by simply adding the following property to their configuration factory=”org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSourceFactory”.

What about the other commons-dbcp configuration options? You don't need to change them at all. Virtually all of the commons-dbcp configuration options are supported by the JDBC Connection Pool. Including but not limited to: testWhileIdle, testOnBorrow, testOnReturn, maxActive, minIdle, maxWait, initialSize, removeAbandoned, removeAbandonedTimeout and logAbandoned.

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posted by Stacey Schneider on January 23, 2012 10:47 AM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.25

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This release includes numerous bug fixes and several new features compared to version 7.0.23. The notable new features include:

• Align the Servlet 3.0 implementation with the changes defined in the first maintenance release (also known as Rev. A.). See the JCP documentation for a detailed list of changes.
• Add support for connectors to automatically select a free port to bind to. This is useful when embedding and for testing.
• Update to Commons Pool 1.5.7, Commons Daemon 1.0.8 and Eclipse JDT compiler 3.7.1.

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posted by Stacey Schneider on January 4, 2012 07:31 AM

2011 has been a great year for the Tomcat Expert community. After almost 2 years of operating, the Tomcat Expert has hit its stride, unloading an array of new information, as well as keeping you up to date with the newest releases for Apache Tomcat 6 and Apache Tomcat 7. With the addition of two new Tomcat Expert Contributors, (Channing Benson and Daniel Mikusa), the Tomcat Expert community continues to build on its reputation for being the leading source for fresh perspectives and new information on how to best leverage Apache Tomcat in the enterprise.

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posted by Stacey Schneider on November 27, 2011 12:08 PM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.23

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This release includes numerous bug fixes and several new features compared to version 7.0.22. The notable new features include:

• The ability to start and stop child containers (primarily Contexts: i.e. web applications) in parallel which can significantly improve start times. This is disabled by default but can be enabled by setting the startStopThreads attribute of a Host to a value greater than one.
• Cache the results of parsing the global and host level context.xml files to improve start times.
• Improve the handling of failed deployments so that a broken application can be fixed (e.g. via JMX) and another attempt made to start it rather than it having to be removed.

Please refer to the change log for the complete list of changes:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/changelog.html

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posted by fhanik on October 19, 2011 07:39 AM

Apache Tomcat, and other containers, have been around for so long today that it has become increasingly harder to get started with them today.

In this article, we will take you back from the beginning with how to get started with Apache Tomcat. We will go into the lowest level, so you don't have to rely on an IDE or other system to get started. This article is written for those that have never used Apache Tomcat and wish to get started in an easy, yet explanatory, way that helps you to understand what is happening under the hood. This will fast track you to become very proficient with this light weight application server.

Step 1. Download and Install Apache Tomcat

While there are a lot of different packages available to install Tomcat, for example some Linux distributions you can download it using that distributions package and dependency management. This is good, for the sake of simplicity, but once again, you lose the concept of what Tomcat is and what true dependencies it has as well on how to use it.

I strongly recommend only moving to a third party packaging of Apache Tomcat after you understand the container itself. This will help avoid complications when you try to create a plan for how you distribute, upgrade and maintain your software.

Rule 1. When learning, only download the software from http://tomcat.apache.org/

Now, since you are learning Apache Tomcat from scratch, I suggest you start with Apache Tomcat 7.  As explained in an earlier post,  the majority of features that are implemented, are driven by the (Servlet) and (JSP) specifications.  Each time the Servlet specification is upgraded, new features added, the Apache Tomcat will plan for a new major release of Apache Tomcat. The latest version, Apache Tomcat 7,  is based on the version of the Servlet specification, in this case, Servlet 3.0.

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posted by mthomas on October 11, 2011 09:10 AM

The Servlet 3 specification - implemented in Apache Tomcat 7 - allows web.xml fragments and annotations to be used to specify configuration information for a web application. This means that, instead of packaging up every configuration centrally in your web.xml file, every JAR can have its own xml fragment containing its own little bit of configuration for whatever classes are in that JAR. This makes it easy to add support for packages with very little effort. For instance, a Spring developer would no longer need to add the Spring application context to the web.xml file, rather they could take advantage of a web fragment in the Spring JAR that would automatically add this configuration information at runtime.

Annotations take this one step further, and allow developers to annotate code that dynamically configures application components such as Servlets and Filters. Java libraries and frameworks have been embracing annotations for some time. In fact, several IDE’s these days use annotations as a default, adding the @WebServlet annotation by default when you create a new Servlet in a dynamic web project.

Performance Impacts

Both annotations and web fragments will impact performance, particularly at application startup. Tomcat has to scan every class in every single jar file to detect if the class has been annotated as a Servlet, a Filter or Listener. This can add substantial time to application start up, which is not so much of a problem for production applications as they should start very infrequently, but it can be pretty problematic during development when you are repetitively restarting.

Tip: If you are not going to be using annotations or web-fragments, you should set your metadata-complete to true in your web.xml file to avoid the longer start up time. (web-app metadata-complete=""true"").

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posted by Stacey Schneider on October 3, 2011 01:29 PM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.22

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Apache Tomcat 7.0.22 includes bug fixes and new features compared to version 7.0.21 including:

• Further improvements to the memory leak detection and prevention features.
• Fix issue that prevented using SSL with the HTTP BIO connector and Java 7.
• Add support for controlling which session attributes are replicated when using session replication (a.k.a clustering).

Please refer to the change log for the complete list of changes:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/changelog.html

Note that this version has 4 zip binaries: a generic one and three bundled with Tomcat native binaries for Windows operating systems runningon different CPU architectures.

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