Ovidiu Predescu wrote:
I'm glad this actually didn't happen, since it took a long time for the 4.0 branch to become stable and usable. If it weren't for the "legacy" codebase being continually developed, we would have been stuck with a slow 3.2 and a buggy 4.0. I've used Tomcat 3.3 for more than a year before switching to 4.1, and I liked 3.3 a lot for its speed and features.
What would have been more likely to happen is that Tomcat 3.3 would have continued on SourceForge, been known by a different name, had a fully supported servlet 2.3 facade, and would have been known as the production quality servlet engine.
Of course, it could had been a funny thing :)
You should also remember that our friend Pier make many remarks about stability on tomcat 4.x and proposed sometimes ago on tomcat-dev to start a fork to make a minimal but more stable TC 4.X
In retrospect, I think the decision to continue the development on both Tomcat versions was a good one. It let the time solve the frictions. The result is that now we have a very mature Tomcat community, and little of the past problems are reflected today on the mailing list.
I agree, if at anytime, TC 3.3.x was said as obsolete or to be discontinued, I'll had to choose an alternate servlet engine since TC 3.2 was too slow and memory consuming and TC 4.x still not production ready.
But the good thing in making TC 3.3 and 4.x teams continuing their own
works was that Tomcat 5 get the best of both part, and was really quickly launched using jakarta-tomcat-connectors as a common sandbox.
Sometimes, when you let 2 teams works in parallel on similar project but different implementation, you avoid that one team fly to another umbrella (ie sf.net) and sus save the community and also you could help making the next revolution by merging good ideas from both projects.
