Tcat Server remains the most intuitive and easy to use product for enterprise Tomcat users. In the most recent release, we made Tcat Server even easier to try.  Since we launched the product several months ago, downloads for Tcat Server have been increasing exponentially, but we wanted to find a way to reach yet more users that will benefit from using Tcat Server.

We realize that some of you do not have time to download software, install it and take a look. Some of you want to first take a quick look at Tcat Server to decide if its the right choice, without having to go through the download process.

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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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We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of our newest release of Tcat Server 6. This new release includes many fixes, in addition to bundling the Apache Software Foundation’s official release binaries of the newest Tomcat release, version 6.0.26.

Here is a summary of the changes and fixes that are included in the new version of Tomcat, since our last release of Tcat Server 6:
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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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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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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.
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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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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…)