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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.
(more…)

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.
(more…)

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.

(more…)

In early days of my career, Sun Microsystems was the company we all looked towards. No other company innovated as much in hardware and then in software as Sun Microsystems did. In fact, Apache Tomcat started as a project at Sun. I would have guessed in the early 90s that Sun would buy Oracle – oh well, how times change.

Oracle has a daunting task ahead of integrating some amazing technologies they acquired from Sun Microsystems. Several important and critical technology pieces such as MySQL, NetBeans, and the whole Java community need careful attention. It is only natural then that some other products might not get an equal amount of TLC from Oracle executives. (more…)

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.
(more…)

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.

(more…)