posted by avanabs on July 29, 2010 07:26 AM

I’ve been following Tomcat 7 development for some time now and I've been asked recently why (and when) clients should upgrade to Tomcat 7, now that it’s nearing release (currently targeted for “late summer”). So, I’ve started to give some thought to that question. I have to admit, the answer wasn’t immediately obvious either way. I’m going to split this blog into two parts; the first with my views and very preliminary results of my testing and evaluation. The second will be based on an interview scheduled for this Wednesday with one of the senior Apache Tomcat “committers”.

Note: In Apache Speak, a Committer is selected by his peers to be trusted to make changes to the code base. In a mature and extremely widely used project like Tomcat, this is very hard to achieve and carries great responsibility.

When I think about “upgrading”, I immediately think about two quite different scenarios.

1. Upgrading existing infrastructure for production environments. “If it works, why mess with it?” surely applies.
2. Selecting the infrastructure for new projects. “Should I really base my critical new project on a dot-zero infrastructure release?” is usually my first thought.

We’ll explore both situations, focusing on both Tomcat 7’s stability as a “dot-zero” release and what new capabilities Tomcat 7 brings to the table.

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