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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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…)

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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Tomorrow, MuleSoft’s Sateesh Narahari (Director of Product Management) and Jason Brittain (MuleSoft Architect and co-author of Tomcat: the Definitive Guide) along with Terracotta’s Ari Zilka (CTO) and Mike Allen (Sr. Director of Product Management) will be doing a webinar on Clustering your Tomcat Servers.
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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…)