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New Apache Tomcat Branch 5.5 Released

Posted by michael on from the now-ever-so-slightly-faster dept.

darthcamaro writes "A good week for Apache Tomcat users - an incremental update to the latest stable version - 5.028 - and a new branch - Apache Tomcat 5.5. According to a story running on internetnews.com, the most notable features include the move to Eclipse from SUN's SDK, which according to one Tomcat user quoted in the story means that Tomcat will be faster than ever before. It's kinda funny that the way to make Java run faster is to take Sun out of the equation..."

6 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Pedantic by arthurs_sidekick · · Score: 5, Informative

    The two main changes are (1) making sure it works with the upcoming JDK 5.0 (formerly 1.5) release and (2) shipping the Eclipse compiler *for compiling JSPs*. Neither of these moves are strikingly fundamental, although the second one is kind of interesting.

    --
    "Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
  2. Change is for JSP compilation ... by jlrobins_uncc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Seems they now default to using the java compiler shipped with Eclipse instead of the com.sun.* compiler which 'javac' uses. So, no tools.jar dependency -- can run on straight sun JRE, not SDK.

    This only effects JSP (re)compilation.

    This could have been made more clear by the submitter. But that wouldn't do, would it?

    1. Re:Change is for JSP compilation ... by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 2, Informative

      can run on straight sun JRE, not SDK.

      This is good news. It was difficult to bundle Tomcat previously because you Sun does not allow you to redistribute the SDK, but you could redistribute pieces of the JDK like javac, or tools.jar (I think they improved this situation in 1.4.2).

      You would need to copy tools.jar or javac from the SDK to the JRE, repackage the JRE, modify the Tomcat startup script to use tools.jar and not depend on bin/jdb (which was not Redistributable).

      Erg...

      --
      "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
    2. Re:Change is for JSP compilation ... by jrumney · · Score: 2, Informative
      It was difficult to bundle Tomcat previously because you Sun does not allow you to redistribute the SDK

      It has always been a one line change in server.xml to configure Tomcat to use jikes instead of tools.jar for compiling JSPs. I wouldn't call that difficult.

  3. Re:eclipse is an sdk? by Hard_Code · · Score: 4, Informative

    RTFA

    They are moving to eclipe's java development tools which include a compiler which is faster than the standard Sun compiler (at the moment I presume). The compiler is used for compiling JSPs.

    --

    It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
  4. amoung other things by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    the stock javac shipped with the JDK has had some issues. In Tomcat 4, they switched to use ANT to create a separate process, so that it wouldn't cause a memory leak. the earlier version use javac within the same JVM, so it would cause a memory leak. JDT is a solid tool and works better, so it makes a lot of sense.