Jan K. Labanowski: "Tomcat, servlets, JSPs and other friends"

Tomcat

Tomcat is a Web server and Servlet/JSP container written in Java. On the Jakarta site, there are two different Tomcats:
  • Tomcat 3.X (currently 3.3) is a stable, extensively debugged version of Tomcat which supports previous Servlet/JCP specification (2.2/1.1).
     
  • Tomcat 4.X (currently 4.0.2) which is quite stable, but still changing, and which supports the latest Servlet/JCP specification (2.3/1.2).
Which one is better? If you start with Tomcat, you should use 4.X. If you maintain Tomcat 3.X, you should probably stay with the 3.X development path, unless you need new features. There are usually 3 different versions of Tomcat available: Release Builds (stable), Milestone Builds (beta), Nightly Builds (alpha). If you did not use Tomcat before, use the Release Builds. Download binary distribution if you are a newcommer. For Linux, you can use rpm distribution. I never use those, but I tried to use them for this talk.