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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..."

3 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 JavaRob · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Exactly -- and I'd also point out that no large site that I know of would be affected by this performance-wise, though faster compilation of JSPs will be nice for development. How often do you make a JSP change that will be seen first by the end user?

      JSPs can be easily precompiled, or just hit by the developer before linking them on the site, to force compilation. Even if compilation is faster than it was, that doesn't mean it's as fast as when the user hits a page that's already been compiled.

      Either way, Tomcat is a great app -- funny that it started as just a simple "reference" implementation of the servlet/JSP APIs....