Tomcat 7.0.6 has just been voted the first Tomcat 7 stable release! This makes Tomcat 6.0.x only a supported stable release, not the latest stable as it had been for several years. A little more than a half a year ago we saw the first 7.0.0 beta release, which was exciting, but now the first stable release is ready to use.
A major branch stable Tomcat release is an infrequent event — it’s been four years since the last major branch, Tomcat 6, was voted stable in February of 2007, and six and a half years since Tomcat 5.5 was voted stable in November of 2004.
| Tomcat Major Version | First Stable Release Version | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| 3.0 | 3.0.0 | December 16, 1999 |
| 4.0 | 4.0.2 | February 10, 2002 |
| 4.1 | 4.1.10 | September 6, 2002 |
| 5.0 | 5.0.16 | December 6, 2003 |
| 5.5 | 5.5.4 | November 10, 2004 |
| 6.0 | 6.0.10 | February 22, 2007 |
| 7.0 | 7.0.6 | January 13, 2011 |
The total download size of Tomcat has climbed only a very small amount with each major release, roughly a megabyte for each successive major release (these are rounded to the nearest megabyte):
$ du -m jakarta-tomcat-5.5.4.tar.gz
6.0.10.tar.gz
7.0.6.tar.gz 5jakarta-tomcat-5.5.4.tar.gz 6
6.0.10.tar.gz 7
7.0.6.tar.gz
Tomcat 7, though a little larger than Tomcat 6, starts faster and runs webapps somewhat faster, and has had some security code fixed and added (such as the CSRF prevention filter). It also implements the new Servlet 3.0 API, which has quite a few major improvements for web application developers. That also means that with Tomcat 7, third party webapps that require a Servlet 3 container are fully supported. Tomcat 7 offers quite a bit better configurability of the server, including several new container components such as the ExpiresFilter, AddDefaultCharsetFilter, and JmxRemoteLifecycleListener, making Tomcat better able to handle problems that were previously left to your webapps to solve. Plus, Tomcat’s source code has been cleaned up and modernized to properly use Java generics in the spots where it should.
Mulesoft congratulates the Apache Tomcat developers / contributors on this major release of Tomcat! And, Tcat Server 6 fully supports managing and monitoring Tomcat 7, right along with your existing Tomcat 6 and Tomcat 5.5 instances.
So, which features would you all like added in Tomcat 8? 🙂
