I am happy to report that Tcat Server 6 R2 is now available for download. Since the first release of Tcat Server 6, we have had a lot of feedback from users. In addition to positive feedback, they also wanted us to add new features to the product. We worked closely with these users to come up with the user stories and then implement them. We believe these features make Tcat Server 6 even more compelling for organizations using Apache Tomcat in development and production, as the features are focussed on reducing the manual effort associated with using Apache Tomcat.
The top three new features are:
1. Configuration Management
You can now use the Tcat Server 6 console to manage the configuration of multiple Tomcat servers. For example, you can increase the heap size of the JVM running Tomcat. You can also publish configuration files required by your application to Tomcat servers from the console itself. No more remote logging to multiple Tomcat servers, manually copying files and editing them individually. We introduced a concept of server profiles, which is an easy way to group together multiple configuration files and environment variables. When a new server comes online, or when you want to deploy your web application to an existing Tomcat server, you can simply apply the profile to the new server, and the Tcat Server console will publish the configuration files and environment settings to the remote Tomcat server.
Behind our configuration management is a powerful file browser that lets you view the files on a remote Tomcat server. You can upload new files, create new folders, and modify existing files. Of course, with power comes security concerns around not making some of the folder readable or writable. We have added support to suppress select folders in the target Tomcat server for reading or writing. In addition, Tcat Server console provides you with the ability to create multiple users and tracks the changes these users make in the activity log.
2. Server Restarts
If you want to restart a remote Tomcat server or several of them at once, the Tcat Server console now supports remote restarts. This comes in handy when you need to deploy a web application that requires you to restart the Tomcat server or when you make a configuration change that requires restart. Again, no more remote login and manually stopping and starting of the Tomcat server is needed.
3. Programmatic API
Several of you have told us that you would like a programmatic API to access to the capabilities of Tcat Server. For example, you might want to pull down your application artifacts from a third-party repository (such as SVN) and deploy it to Tomcat servers. You can use the Tcat Server API to do deployments, change configurations, and even issue a remote restart. The programmatic API is designed to be RESTful and can be called from your Java programs, Groovy scripts, or other languages that support invoking of REST APIs.
In addition to these features, we have also fixed bugs, updated our Maven plugin, and updated our EC2 plugin. I can go on about the new features and improvements, but given that Tcat Server 6 R2 is available for download now, take it for a spin and let us know what you think. The product is free for use in development. For details on getting started and using the product, see the Tcat Server documentation.
As always, you can reach the entire Tcat Server team by sending an email to tcat at mulesoft.
