Action Items List for Catalina

This document is a living list of the action items related to the current development of the Catalina architecture for the Tomcat servlet container. Catalina is being designed and built to serve as a replacement for the core servlet execution environment currently present in Tomcat 3.x, and is targeted to become functional in time for a Tomcat 4.0 release. All of the source code for the Catalina architecture is currently in a subdirectory named proposals/catalina in the jakarta-tomcat subproject.

The columns in this report contain the following information:

Additions to, subtractions from, and changes to the action items listed here should be discussed and approved on the TOMCAT-DEV mailing list, as described on the Decision Making page on the Jakarta Project web site. Developers can nominate themselves to work on particular action items by asking a Committer to add their name and EMAIL address to those items. The developers working on each item should discuss and agree upon the approach to be used for implementing the item's changes to the project source code and documentation, prior to completing those changes. Such discussions should take place on the TOMCAT-DEV mailing list so that everyone can stay apprised of what is going on, or chime in if they want to contribute ideas and suggestions.

For convenience, the action items have been organized into general categories, which are presented in alphabetical order. The following categories of actions are currently identified:





Architecture

Priority Action Item Volunteers
Medium Define extensions (if necessary) to the Catalina architecture to support distributed, load-balanced, servlet containers. Craig McClanahan
Medium Define and provide default implementations for logging of server related events and messages, as opposed to the application-level logging provided by Logger implementations. [org.apache.tomcat.syslog?] ---

Connectors

Priority Action Item Volunteers
Medium Design and implement an extended version of the HTTP/1.1 connector that supports communication over secure sockets using SSL/TLS, the https: URL scheme, SSL-based request attributes, and SSL-based sessions. [org.apache.tomcat.connector.ssl]
Medium Design and implement a high-performance Connector implementation that supports two-way integration with Apache in both in-process (Apache 2.0 only) and out-of-process (Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0) environments. [org.apache.tomcat.connector.apache] ---
Medium Design and implement a high-performance Connector implementation that supports two-way integration with Microsoft Information Server (IIS) in both in-process and out-of-process environments. [org.apache.tomcat.connector.iis] ---
Medium Design and implement a high-performance Connector implementation that supports two-way integration with Netscape Enterprise Server (NES) in both in-process and out-of-process environments. [org.apache.tomcat.connector.nes] ---

Core Servlet Engine Functionality

Priority Action Item Volunteers
Medium Design and implement support for request dispatchers that conforms to the Servlet API Specification. [org.apache.tomcat.core] ---
Low Design and implement a specialized ServletContext class for use when ServletContext.getContext("/") is called. [org.apache.tomcat.core] ---
Low Implement the optional web application environment support described in Section 9.9 of the Servlet API Specification Version 2.2, and Chapter 5 of the Java2 Platform Enterprise Edition Version 1.2 Specification. ---

Server Administration Functionality

Priority Action Item Volunteers
Medium Design and implement a web application providing server management support for a running Catalina installation. [org.apache.tomcat.admin] John Shin
Low Add out-of-the-box functionality to install Tomcat as a "service" under Microsoft NT. [org.apache.tomcat.startup] ---

Servlet Provided Functionality

Priority Action Item Volunteers
Low Design and implement a servlet that supports interpretation of web-server-like "server side include" directives, typically found in *.shtml files. [org.apache.tomcat.servlets] ---
Low Design and implement a servlet that supports interpretation of <servlet> directives, typically found in *.jhtml files. [org.apache.tomcat.servlets] ---
Low Design and implement a CGI emulation servlet for Catalina. [org.apache.tomcat.servlets] ---

Session Management Functionality

Priority Action Item Volunteers
High Revise the ManagerBase, StandardManager, and StandardSession classes to reflect the HTTP versus non-HTTP refactoring of the underlying interfaces. [org.apache.tomcat.session] Craig McClanahan
Medium Design and implement a Manager implementation that supports swapping of active, but idle, sessions to persistent storage via a suitably configured Store implementation. [org.apache.tomcat.session] Chris Parrinello
Medium Finish design and implementation of a filesystem-based Store implementation. [org.apache.tomcat.session] Chris Parrinello
Medium Design and implement a JDBC-based Store implementation. [org.apache.tomcat.session] Chris Parrinello
Medium Design and implement a Store implementation based on JavaSpaces and/or IBM's TSpaces frameworks. Jim Cook

Utility Component Functionality

Priority Action Item Volunteers
Medium Design and implement a Realm implementation that accesses authentication and role information from a JNDI-accessed directory server. [org.apache.tomcat.realm] James W.
Medium Design and implement a Resources implementation that interacts with a web server Connector (such as the one for Apache) to access web server resources through the connection protocol, rather than as disk files. ---
Low In LoggerBase, add support for optional "decoration" of logged messages with XML elements. [org.apache.tomcat.logger] ---

Valve Provided Functionality

Priority Action Item Volunteers
High Design and implement form-based authentication. [org.apache.tomcat.security] John Shin
Medium Design and implement support for SSL/TLS based authentication. [org.apache.tomcat.security] John Shin
Medium Extend the authentication implementations to operate at the Engine or Host level of the Container hierarchy, not just the Context level, to provide "single sign on" support. ---
Low In AccessLogValve, implement parsing and pattern matching for more complete emulation of Apache's custom log generation capabilities. ---
Low Improve security of the HTTP DIGEST authentication implementation. [org.apache.tomcat.security] Remy Maucherat


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