I have been following this insane tomcat 4 vs tomcat 3 debate with increasing amazement. I cannot understand why this has become such a big issue. Attempting to tell an open source developer what to write is pretty much counter to ESR's cited prime motivation for open source development - scratching a personal itch! If Costin (bless his soul) wants to make TC3 a better product, then he has my own profound thanks!
As a user of tomcat (I use tomcat every day as part of my job) am very keen to see tomcat 3.x development continue as long as tomcat 4 falls short of release quality. Until IIS integration and SSL client certificate support are considered release quality in tomcat 4, I am keen to see them developed on tomcat 3.
In fact, I believe that the time to abandon tomcat 3 development will come at around the point that new features are able to reach release quality as fast on tomcat 4 as on tomcat 3. The technology used in tomcat 3 is perfectly current. Forcing people into participating in development of a bleeding edge product in order to add features to tomcat seems pretty mercurial.
Tomcat 3 is just becoming a premium quality product. There are two or three features still to be added to completely satisfy my own requirements of a servlet container. If we abandon development now in favour tomcat 4, tomcat will remain a bleeding edge product and may never reach the mainstream release quality that I for one would like to see.
What I suggest is this:
Whoever wants to develop on tomcat 4 does so.
Whoever wants to develop on tomcat 3 does so.
Versions are managed in a similar manner to the linux development/stable trees, with code from TC4 merged back into TC3 whenever the TC3 guys feels that this enhances the product. (And no complaining about the tomcat 3 guys 'copying' the TC4 guys - that is kind of the point of open source!)
Cheers and Merry Christmas!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron Knauf
Implementation Consultant
Genie Systems Ltd
Auckland, New Zealand
Ph. +64-9-573 3310 x812, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.geniesystems.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Jon Stevens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
22/12/2000 11:26
|
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> cc: Subject: Re: F.... |
on 12/21/2000 2:18 PM, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Tomcat3.2 is a big step forward versus Tomcat3.1 - but it still have many
> issues - take a look at the ContextManager in 3.3, compare it with 3.2 -
> there are still many undefined behaviors, even code from 3.0.
Tomcat 3.2 has *only* happened because Tomcat 4.0 wasn't ready.
Remember the history of Tomcat 4.0 and the fact that if Sun didn't donate a
bunch of cruft software, we would have spent the time working on JServ 2.0
which is now what Tomcat 4.0 is. The fact of the matter is that because we
had to deal with 3.x and support improving it that delayed the development
of 4.0 to not being ready until now.
It is this duplication of effort that needs to stop. We need to quit sitting
back and trying to support something that should have been dead long ago.
-jon
