The second Release Candidate of Tomcat 3.3 is available for download and testing. As a Tomcat 3.x release, it remains an implementation of the Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 specifications.
This release of Tomcat 3.3 will be offered for vote to become Tomcat 3.3 Final. No code changes will occur prior to Tomcat 3.3 Final. Should a show-stopper bug be discovered in RC2, it will be fixed and an RC3 released. Documentation updates will continue so that the documentation will be as complete as possible, though not necessarily 100% finished. There should be enough information present now to take advantage of most of the features of Tomcat 3.3. You may wish to check the online documentation at: <http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-3.3-doc/> for the most current information. It will be kept current with updates made to the documentation. If you did not try the earlier 3.3 releases, the following additional information may help you make full use of this release: 1) The binary distribution has source for the connectors, but not for the Tomcat container. The source from the full jakarta-tomcat CVS tree is available separately in the "v3.3-rc2/src" directory. 2) The new class loader scheme in this release ignores your CLASSPATH setting. Instead, you may add needed jars to Tomcat's "lib/apps", "lib/common", and "lib/container" directories. See the tomcat-ug.html file in Tomcat's "doc" directory for details. Also supported are two System properties: org.apache.tomcat.apps.classpath org.apache.tomcat.common.classpath which add their listed classes and jars to the jars in "lib/apps" and "lib/common", respectively. 3) When using Tomcat with a web server, such as Apache, Tomcat can be configured to use the web server authentication, or have Tomcat authenticate the user itself. The default is to have Tomcat do its own authentication. Set tomcatAuthentication="false" on the Ajp13Interceptor in the server.xml file if you want use the web server's authentication. 4) Tomcat 3.3 now performs a validation check on your web.xml's by default. This insures portability of you web applications. You may see errors reported if you port a web application from an eariler Tomcat that did not do this validation. The validation may be turned off by setting validate="false" on WebXmlReader in the server.xml file. 5) The "sanity-test" is not part of the binary distribution like it was with Tomcat 3.2. However, it is available in "War" form (test.war), along with the Watchdog JSP (watchdog-jsp.war) and servlet tests (watchdog-servlet.war). These are found in the "v3.3-rc2/apps" directory. Place these War files in Tomcat's "webapps" directory before starting Tomcat. To simplify testing, these tests can be run from the Admin web application. See the "readme" file in Tomcat's "doc" directory for details. Please download this release and give it a try in your environment. The source, rpms, and binaries may be found at: http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-tomcat/release/v3.3-rc2 Note: As of this moment, and netware connectors have not been added to the web site. They will appear in the near future. To log problems or bugs, as well as submit patches, please refer to: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/bugs.html When logging bugs to Bugzilla, please specify the Product as "Tomcat 3" and the Version as "3.3 Release Candidate 2". Also, supplying a test case will greatly improve our ability to address the problem. Please do so if at all possible. Thanks, Larry Isaacs
