posted by fhanik on May 1, 2012 07:13 AM

With the Apache Tomcat 7.0.27 release, the Apache Tomcat team introduced a WebSocket implementation. In a previous post, we took a look at what the WebSocket implementation means, including what benefits and limitations they present. Today, we will discuss specifically how WebSocket is implemented in Apache Tomcat 7.

Since WebSocket is a protocol sent over TCP after an initial HTTP handshake, you could effectively implement WebSocket using Tomcat’s Comet implementation. There is a back port to Tomcat 6 suggested that does exactly that with very minor changes.

The Apache Tomcat team however decided to go with a more substantial implementation with changes to the core of Tomcat’s network and protocol implementation. The reason for this was memory and scalability based. If Tomcat can recycle the HttpServletRequest/Response objects after the initial handshake, each WebSocket connection will take up less memory in the Java heap. It also opens up the Tomcat container for other future protocols that utilize the HTTP Upgrade feature.

The WebSocket implementation from an API standpoint is fairly straightforward. You really can only do two things:

1. Send messages
2. Receive messages

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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 Stacey Schneider on April 5, 2012 01:59 PM

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 7.0.27

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This release is includes significant new features as well as a number of bug fixes compared to version 7.0.26. The notable changes include:

• Support for the WebSocket protocol (RFC6455). Both streaming and message based APIs are provided and the implementation currently fully passes the Autobahn test suite. Also included are several examples.
• A number of fixes to the HTTP NIO connector, particularly when using Comet.
• Improve the memory leak prevention and detection code so that it works well with JVMs from IBM.

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 running on different CPU architectures.

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