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…)

It’s a very good thing that Tomcat is open source software. Because it is open, it enjoys broad stand-alone adoption, plus it has been incorporated as part of many other application server products, both commercial and open source. Why reinvent the wheel when Tomcat works great as a generic web container, and the source code is free? Many smart application server teams have chosen to embed Tomcat as their web container. They pull a copy of the Tomcat source code that they know works well, put it into their own source tree, and hook Tomcat’s Ant build system into their own, and rebuild Tomcat as part of their project. (more…)