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Tomcat 5.0 Released
aquarium writes "The Apache Jakarta Project announces the release of the first stable version of Tomcat 5.0. Improvements include performance optimizations, scalability and reliability enhancements, and improved Taglibs handling."
The idea of using a language like Java to build webpages seems interesting, at least because Java is designed to scale well on big programs. Perl at least scales just fine; I don't know about PHP though.
It's interesting to note that Linux (probably with Apache's Tomcat) is a very popular system for JavaServer Pages (where one would have expected Sun's own Solaris platform to be popular). There is an article at Netcraft (from July) that summarizes the situation:
JSP continues to enjoy fast growth with a 94% increase in ip addresses running JSP based sites to over 44,000 ip addresses running some 105,000 active sites.
More surprising is the composition of these sites choice of operating systems. One might expect that by far the most common operating system amongst JSP based sites would be Solaris, (...). However, Solaris is only placed 3rd with 17% behind Linux with 40% and Windows with 26%.
Tomcat now accounts for a large percentage of the downloads on Apache. In fact, earlier this year the traffic for jakarta related projects was so high, Apache decided all distributions had to be mirrored. Many hours of blood and sweat has gone into tomcat 5. The new features of JSP2.0 like file tags and clarifications on request filters is a good step forward. There have also been a lot of improvements in tomcat. GZip compression is now standard and tomcat 5 includes a plugin feature for Jasper which allows developers to write modules to translate tags to pure java. The new features are worth while.
One of the biggest changes seems to be support for the JSP 2.0 specification, which incorporates JSTL (Java Standard Template Library) version 1.1. For more info on what this means, read this article at OnJava.com. The Expression Language (EL in the article) adds a lot of nice features to help keep your JSPs clean without having to use struts.
I downloaded Tomcat 5 from an apache mirror, and I am impressed. It was a drop-in replacement for the Tomcat 4 that was included with OSX Panther 10.3.x.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Linux by default will use as much memory as it can(as any OS would i hope). Running all of those on a 128MB machine means nothing. How much swap do you have and how much is used? If your machine sits there and swaps every time a page is loaded, thats not very good. Imagine your physical RAM as an automobile, and you have to pick up and drop off 20 passengers, but you can only fit 5 people in the car at a time. You will have to swap them in/out and go back for them, figure out the best path, etc. as i said, saying you run all that with only 128MB isn't a very good measure. At work we have a box running apache+tomcat+mysql+a few other things and it uses almost all of its available 384MB plus a little swap.
For those people looking for the full J2EE stack, the latest JBoss 3.2.3 release also comes bundled with this latest Tomcat 5.0.16 release (The JBoss distro comes bundled with both Tomcat 5.0.16 and Tomcat 4.1.29 service archives). It's a pretty nice combo of two solid servers.
This is good news. Tomcat is the reference Servlet implementation. So if it works on Tomcat it _should_ work on other servlet engines. So people that may have held off deploying or even developing Servlet 2.4/JSP 2.0 application may now start down that trail.
Also, let's not forget there are a couple of other great choices out there: Resin with Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 and the alpha Jetty 5.0 the Servlet 2.4.
Linux VPS Based Java Hosting - Now with Tomcat 5 if you want it
Another good news is JMX (Java Management eXtension) support. Untill now, only Bea WebLogic and JBoos (??) have JMX support (not WebSphere) ... Over JMX HP biult a monitoring framework such as OpenView untill now running typically on Bea ...