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…)

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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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…)

I often get questions about how to tune Tomcat for better performance.  It is usually best to answer this only after first spending some time understanding the installation of Tomcat, the web site’s traffic level, and the web applications that it runs.  But, there are some general performance tips that apply regardless of these important details.  In general, Tomcat performs better when you:

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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…)