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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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.

Please retweet/blog or email the survey to your friends and colleagues. Thank you for your help!

To take the Survey, click  HERE.

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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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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Today, MuleSoft released a brand new product, Mule Data Integrator, which is available for download here. Mule Data Integrator (MDI) is free for developers to use and includes an Eclipse-based designer that is fully integrated with Mule IDE.

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At MuleSoft we use Agile development to build and deliver all of our software products. One of the more challenging and potentially time consuming part of agile is story estimating. Recently we decided to take a new approach to this that has proven to be a lot of fun and amazingly accurate. I call it Bubble Sort Estimation. (more…)

Launching Tcat Server was a new type of challenge for MuleSoft. How do we take something that everyone knows — Apache Tomcat – and differentiate it with the enterprise features that our customers were asking for?

We started with a set of principles that would help us deliver this value. These included: (more…)

This week is an exciting one at MuleSoft — we just announced our newest product, MuleSoft Tcat Server. Tcat Server is a new enterprise Tomcat server, which provides application provisioning and server management capabilities for Apache Tomcat. You can read the press release here. (more…)

In their annual 2009 Bossie Awards, InfoWorld once again named Mule ESB as the #1 open source ESB, in the “Best of Open Source Platforms and Middleware” category. (more…)

SAP users, rejoice! Our esteemed partners at Osaka Gas Information System Research Institute Co., Ltd (OGIS) in Japan have created the SAP transport for Mule 2, available for download from MuleForge.

Yuji Yamano, the project lead on the SAP transport, explained how it works:

“The SAP transport provides connectivity with SAP ERP 6.0. Users can send an XML message that is equivalent to a BAPI function request and receive an XML message that is equivalent to a BAPI function response. The transport uses RFC and BAPI calls via JCO (SAP Java Connector) provided by SAP.”

He went on to explain that since SAP is the market-leading ERP player, with a dominant deployment footprint in more than 120 countries globally, the SAP transport will enable countless IT organizations to now integrate their core SAP systems with other applications and services using the power and simplicity of Mule ESB. Most IT organizations have had to rely on expensive and heavyweight proprietary integration solutions or custom code to move data in and out of their SAP applications. With the new SAP transport, SAP users will see a dramatic improvement in the cost equation.

For more information, or to download and review the SAP transport, visit the SAP Transport home page.