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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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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Today, MuleSoft announced a new cloud service offering – Cloudcat - which will dramatically reduce the time and effort it takes to use Apache Tomcat in the cloud.

Your application infrastructure should never get in the way of delivering the web applications.  Cloud computing has been gaining rapid adoption with developers and IT organizations alike, as it is often the easiest way to provision infrastructure for delivering applications. Apache Tomcat is perfectly suited for the cloud, because it is light weight and does not have the burden of a full blown Java EE application server, a huge advantage when you are paying cloud service providers “by the drink .”  However, until now, provisioning a new Tomcat instance in the cloud has required a considerable amount of work, since you need to provision a server image, manually download and install Tomcat, configure the database and more.

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Apache Tomcat is the perfect application server for deploying your web applications in production. In fact, it also happens to be the only Java application server that has hardening guidelines published by Center for Internet Security (CIS). CIS publishes hardening guidelines for widely used software to help enterprises protect their deployments. The very fact that they have hardening guidelines for Tomcat is a testament to its widespread popularity and usage.

So, how do you know if your Tomcat installation is secure? Its actually very easy. I will provide step-by-step instructions on evaluating whether your Tomcat is secure. If you find that you need to make changes, you can use Tcat Server to harden your Tomcat instance.
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The new stable release of Tomcat 6.0.24 represents six months of open source software development. Version 6.0.24 includes a small number of new features, plus a large amount of important bug fixes and enhancements. This release is an incremental bug fix release, but the number of fixes included in this release is high. (more…)

While we like to believe that our application servers and web applications are flawless, the reality is that applications have bugs. Sometimes, they have nasty bugs, such as holding onto references and thus causing larger memory consumption over time. As a result, many IT operations have put in place processes to restart the application servers and web applications on a periodic basis. Some have written scripts to do this, and some rely on an administrator to wake up in the middle of the night to login remotely to the server and do the restarts. Even if you have flawless web applications, you still need to restart your application server as a result of configuration changes and/or to deploy new versions of your web applications. (more…)

ObjectWatch has put out a report titled The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity. They estimate that we are losing $500 billion per month in IT failures. That’s a scary number. If this rate of failure continues, business confidence in IT will diminish.

A couple of points in the report caught my eye, as they are applicable to the points we have been discussing over the last several months.

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For those of you who are using Apache Tomcat in QA, staging, or production, I have no doubt that periodically you end up in the situation where you need to configure Tomcat’s server.xml, catalina.properties, logging.properties, and/or other Tomcat configuration files so that your webapps run the way you need them to run. Even though Tomcat allows us to configure the webapp’s <Context> in a separate file from server.xml, and even though Tomcat allows context.xml in the webapp’s META-INF directory that can be bundled as part of the webapp, that’s almost never enough to configure everything that the webapp needs. The <Context> tag by itself is just not self-contained to the point where you don’t also have to configure other important things in Tomcat’s server.xml to go along with your webapp’s <Context> configuration. (more…)

I am happy to report that Tcat Server 6 R2 is now available for download. Since the first release of Tcat Server 6, we have had a lot of feedback from users. In addition to positive feedback, they also wanted us to add new features to the product. We worked closely with these users to come up with the user stories and then implement them. We believe these features make Tcat Server 6 even more compelling for organizations using Apache Tomcat in development and production, as the features are focussed on reducing the manual effort associated with using Apache Tomcat.
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