On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Johan Compagner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> One tomcat question for this list (i know there are some tomcat developers here)
> Why can't i find changes.html or something like that for the tomcat versions?
>
The short answer is that most folks don't take the time to do detailed
release notes. I try to buck that trend (both on Struts and on Tomcat
4.0), but it's a lot of work.
> You got now a
> 3.1.x branch (doesn't seem to be in development anymore)
It's not. Superceded by 3.2 series. (3.1 also had tons of bugs,
including bugs that adversely affect Struts-based apps).
> 3.2.x branch (still development 3.2.2 beta 1 as latest mile stonde)
3.2.1 is the current production quality release of Tomcat, 3.2.2 is
imminent with fixes primarily in the web connectors area.
> 3.3.x branch (the latest in 3.x)
>
WARNING - I'm not an unbiased observer of this branch :-)
Last September, the TOMCAT-DEV mailing list decided on using the Catalina
code base (of which I am the primary author ... it's lineage dates back to
the days before Tomcat was released to Apache) as the code that would
become the next major version of Tomcat -- version 4.0 -- and implement
the new servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specs. The idea was that 3.2 would go
into maintenance mode, and heavy development of new features would happen
in the 4.0 area.
That was not satisfactory to some folks -- including Costin Manolache, who
did the yeoman's work in getting Tomcat to 3.1, and a lot of the work on
3.2. He does not like the technical architecture of Catalina, so lobbied
to "finish what he started" and continued refactoring the 3.2 code.
Essentially, what has happened since is a fork of the Tomcat development
community. Time will tell whether the fork becomes permanent (i.e. one or
the other codebase stays "Tomcat" and the other goes and lives somewhere
else) or whether the 3.3 branch is just a dead end that people lose
interest in once 4.0 is released.
> And you got 4.0
>
4.0 is where I personally put my time -- it's my "day job".
> I know the differences between 3.x (servlet 2.2 / jsp 1.1) and 4.x (servlet 2.3 /
>jsp 1.2)
>
The spec documents themselves have a pretty good summary of the changes
from the previous versions. You can download the current drafts from:
http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/download.html
http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/download.html
In terms of user features, I'm doing a talk at ApacheCon about Tomcat 4.0,
and spend a couple of slides highlighting the new goodies. I'll post the
presentation after ApacheCon is over.
> But why all those 3.x branches and why are there even 2 in development?
>
Basically, its because people want to work on what they want to work
on. For their own reasons, some folks want a "better servlet 2.2/JSP 1.1
container", conveniently neglecting the fact that Tomcat 4.0 runs such
applications, including Struts-based apps, just fine ...
> Johan
>
>
>
>
Craig
