Tcat Server remains the most intuitive and easy to use product for enterprise Tomcat users. In the most recent release, we made Tcat Server even easier to try.  Since we launched the product several months ago, downloads for Tcat Server have been increasing exponentially, but we wanted to find a way to reach yet more users that will benefit from using Tcat Server.

We realize that some of you do not have time to download software, install it and take a look. Some of you want to first take a quick look at Tcat Server to decide if its the right choice, without having to go through the download process.

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Recently, there was an interesting article on ReadWriteWeb questioning the long term effect of the proliferation of public APIs, versus merely offering crawlable data. On one hand – the article argued – APIs offer a great deal of control to the publisher and they are great for access to real-time information. On the other hand, if data is only accessible through an API then it is not available for spiders and crawlers and thus won’t show up in search results. In effect, the public loses out, since less data can be searched for.

However, I think this takes a somewhat limited view on what an API can be. In fact, if the API is designed properly then the API itself can be discovered via a crawler, along with all the information the API provider chooses to make public. This is particularly true for RESTful APIs where ‘discoverability’ is a fundamental design concept. For example, in the open source RESTx project – a fast and simple way to create RESTful web services – a RESTful, documented and fully discoverable API is created automatically. (more…)

Do you ever ask yourself these questions: “Can I eliminate the redeploy phase from Tomcat’s development cycle? How can I more efficiently diagnose performance bottlenecks in my Tomcat application? How can I simplify configuring Tomcat for my application?”

Apache Tomcat users spend 160 hours per year waiting for redeploys, not to mention the time getting back into the flow of coding. They also spend quite a bit of time configuring Tomcat for deployment to production, and investigating and resolving performance and availability issues — without deep diagnostic data.

In a webinar on July 28th at 10am PT, MuleSoft and ZeroTurnaround have teamed up to provide web application developers using Tomcat with the ultimate “one-two punch” for developer productivity.

Register now!

Join us for a 45-minute demo-driven webinar, where you will see how JRebel and Tcat Server can help you:

• Instantly see the effects of your code changes without having to restart Tomcat
• Discover and quickly resolve performance issues with deep diagnostic capabilities
• Visually browse and edit Tomcat configuration files

Speakers:
Sateesh Narahari, Director of Product Management at MuleSoft
Toomas Romer, Co-Founder, Lead Developer at ZeroTurnaround

Logistics:
Date: July 28, 2010
Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 5pm GMT / 6pm BST (find your time zone)

Organizations running Apache Tomcat in production on Windows often want to run Tomcat as a Windows service. This removes the need for someone to be actively logged into the server and provides an easy way to integrate with Windows management tools. In this blog, I will explain the easiest way to run Tomcat as a Windows service and how you can do this for multiple instances as well.

Running an instance of Apache Tomcat as a Windows service is not complicated, if you download the correct distribution of Tomcat (Windows service Installer). However, running multiple instances of Tomcat as Windows services is a more complicated process. To avoid issues, you would have to:

1. Uninstall the service that the installer has installed ( if you used the service installer)

2. Run the service.bat command and give it an unique name ( so, next service install would not fail )

service.bat install MyTomcat2 ( you have to download the zip distribution to get service.bat )

2. For each instance, edit server.xml and manually modify all ports to unique non-default numbers

3. Go to Service Control Manager by running ’services’ from Start menu and change the startup type for each instance to be “Automatic”

You would have to repeat this process for each instance that you want to install, which can get tedious and potentially quite error-prone.

The Tcat Server installer provides a much better experience by enabling you to select a name for the service and also by enabling you to install multiple Tomcat instances on the same box. All you have to do is to run a standard install of Tcat Server on Windows, and it will automatically install Apache Tomcat as a Windows service. It can detect name conflicts and pick unique service names for the Windows services. (The installer also detects port conflicts, so you don’t run into start-up issues due to port conflicts).

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“Having Trouble With Multiple Instances” is one of those famous Tomcat users list topics that never goes away.  In fact, the question has been asked so many times that at this point, the people asking it are lucky if they get a response that’s more helpful than RTFM.

These errors are almost always caused by port conflicts.  When running multiple instances of Tomcat on a single machine, each instance must be configured with a unique set of port numbers.  This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s actually very easy to get wrong.  Every port number must be unique on the system, and has to be changed manually in multiple locations within Tomcat’s XML configuration files, which leaves plenty of room for accidental errors.

There had to be a better way.  With the release of Tcat Server 6 R3, there is!  Tcat Server 6 R3 includes an easy way to get multiple instances of Tomcat up and running on your machine with zero errors.

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We released Tcat Server 6 R3 today. This release packs features that were directly a result of customer feedback. Here are some of the highlights:

• Support for Tomcat 7.0 beta – Tomcat 7.0 beta was recently announced.  Our engineers have been working with Tomcat 7.0 to support it as soon as it came out. You can now manage Tomcat 7.0 instances as well as Tomcat 6 and 5.5 instances. We are currently the first and only vendor in the world that provides enterprise Tomcat for versions 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0 beta.
• Easiest way to run Tomcat as a Windows service – we didn’t stop at providing a way to run Tomcat as a Windows service, we integrated it with installer and provided tools that make it very easy to run Tomcat and Tcat Server console as a windows service. By running Tomcat as a Windows service, you can eliminate the need to have an administrator account logged into the server all the time.
• Super-simple deployment – Tcat Server already has an easy to use interface to deploy web applications to one or more Tomcat instances. We are taking this further by providing an easier way to upgrade a deployed application by simply clicking on an upgrade icon. We also made it easy to upload a new application or use the one that you already have in the inbuilt repository. Based on feedback from users, we changed the term from “package” to “deployment.” In prior versions, you were creating a package, starting with this R3 release, you create a “Deployment” – this is done to avoid any confusion with the overloaded term “package.” (more…)

Many of you reading this have already seen the Apache Software Foundation’s press release about Tomcat 7.0.0 — it was voted beta quality on June 25th, and the Tomcat 7 web pages went live on the Tomcat project web site this morning. It looks wonderful! Congratulations to the Tomcat development team on a year and a half of Tomcat 7 development! This first beta release of the Tomcat 7 branch is a major step forward in that it implements the Java Servlet 3.0 API, which is not an incremental revision of the last version. It is a major feature revision that modernizes the Servlet API in a number of ways, and adds quite a few new features that webapp developers will use and enjoy.

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Recently I was hiking with couple of friends – one of them runs IT operations for a large consumer company. He was on call that weekend, so, sure enough, his phone rang: it was the customer service coordinator who was saying that her team was not able to access the application. My friend had to run back to the car to power up his laptop, connect to the VPN using his wireless card, check status of his Tomcat servers and jump on a bridge call. My other friend was busy tweeting and doing a foursquare check-in of his location (I think becoming mayor of a remote mountain in Colorado counts for something ).

So, to help Tomcat admins who might not always be at their computer during on-call weekends, we just announced a TomcatStats for iPhone, the world’s first iPhone app for managing Apache Tomcat. Using TomcatStats, you can check if the Tomcat instances are running or not, if the applications on those servers are up or not and also get details about memory usage, connections etc.

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Tcat Server is the best solution for running enterprise Apache Tomcat or the upcoming Tomcat 7 in IT.  Tcat Server is also a great choice in development environments with its reliable restarts, rich tomcat specific diagnostics and more.  Best of all,  Tcat Server is free for use in development and pre-production.

However, we do not provide a perpetual license for use with Tcat Server in development. Instead, we want to hear from you every so often. We would love to get some feedback on how the product is working for you on the development side and if you have suggestions for improving the product.

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Last week, we did a webinar with Terracotta on scaling and managing your web applications running on Tomcat. During the webinar, I did a short demo that showed a Terracotta profile, which makes it super easy to setup the environment required for web applications that use HTTP session clustering using Terracotta.

I previously blogged about how to create a server profile and apply it to servers here. In this case, I created a Terracotta profile in just minutes with Tcat Server.

Basically, creating a Terracotta profile involved the following steps:

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