One of the good things about Apache Tomcat is that it is world’s most efficient and effective application server for running web applications. Legacy Java EE application servers can be more trouble than they are worth due to their inherent complexity and feature bloat.

In January of this year, the Apache Software Foundation released, Tomcat 6.0.24 , which made major improvements in finding and preventing memory leaks in web applications.  Today the ASF released Tomcat 6.0.26, which is an improvement over 6.0.24. (If you are wondering what happened to 6.0.25, that release was deemed not suitable to be released).

Here are highlights of the changes that went into this release since 6.0.24:
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It has been a while since I last blogged about the new XMPP transport for Mule ESB. I’ve been making slow progress since then, but I’ve finally arrived at a point where the transport is starting to be useable. I’d like to show that by building a simple jabber client using the XMPP and stdio transports.

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The Lean Startups movement has produced several important and successful techniques that can yield benefits to all types of organizations. One of these is continuous deployment — a process in which all code written for an application is immediately deployed into production. The result is a dramatic reduction in the development cycle time and the freeing of individual initiative.  You can read about it here as described by Eric Ries.

Implementing the continuous deployment methodology can be difficult if you are developing Java EE applications, which come with inherent delays associated with the complexity of deployment and restart times for most Java EE servers. However, if you are using a lightweight, efficient application server such as Apache Tomcat, you have an advantage.

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In a recent post by Loraine Lawson on ITBusinessEdge, an informal survey was cited that referenced a majority of mid-market CIOs who “said they had no current business need for SOA.” I was a little surprised by the headline since MuleSoft continues to see tremendous adoption of our open source Mule ESB and subscriptions of our enterprise version among companies I would describe as mid-market. So, I decided to read further and try to learn more. More »

Mule community member, author, and consultant Eugene Ciurana recently discussed a technique for extending or modifying the run-time code in Mule without stopping the server, greatly reducing development time for Mule apps.

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In our continuous quest to understand developer trends and preferences, we are conducting a short survey. The survey should take around 5 minutes to complete and will help us gain insight into developer trends. We may contact you for a follow-up discussion to get detailed input from you. We will also enter your name into a random drawing for $100 if you provide contact information.

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Are you frustrated with how hard it is to build and manage your web applications? Are you looking for a way to automate your webapp release and deployment processes? And for a way to easily manage upgrades and rollbacks to groups of Tomcat servers?

Join Dan Diephouse, Sr. Architect at MuleSoft, and Jason vna Zyl, founder of Maven and Sonatype, for a webinar on Seamless Webapp Deployment with Maven and Tcat Server.

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As mentioned in my last post, I have recently spent some time improving the Tomcat package on the Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions. This post goes into more detail on those changes.
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Recently, while working with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, an opportunity came up for us at MuleSoft to take on open-source community work to improve the Ubuntu Tomcat 6 package. Having spent several years administering the most popular Tomcat Internet Relay Chat channel, I’ve gathered lots of feedback from Tomcat users about what they had difficulty with, and the changes I had to offer turned into implementation work.
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A part of the work we are doing on Mule 3 is to clean up and simplify the existing design. One thing I recently started working on is untangling the relationship between MuleMessage and MessageAdapter and review the use of message adapters throughout the code base.

The current design around these two is somewhat awkward: MuleMessage extends MessageAdapter. I consider this to be the exposure of an implementation detail rather than a good design choice. The MessageAdapter is a throwback from the first Mule architecture, but we’ve moved on from that so it is high time to revisit this approach.

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