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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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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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…)

The move from big legacy Java EE application servers such as IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic to Apache Tomcat is accelerating, according to a recent Tomcat survey that MuleSoft drove in collaboration with Computerworld.

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Finally, a way to develop and deploy Tomcat applications with ease! Are you developing applications on Apache Tomcat, or are you a Tomcat administrator? Have you been looking for ways to reduce tedious manual work as you deploy and manage your Tomcat applications, or are you seeking better visibility into your application’s performance metrics and faster resolution of problems? (more…)