Proposed Plan: Tomcat 4.0-m3 on Wednesday

["Craig R. McClanahan" <Cr...@eng.sun.com>]

I'm planning on cutting a "milestone 3" release of Tomcat 4.0 on
Wednesday morning (October 18), prior to getting on a plane for
ApacheCon Europe in London the following day.  There is a reasonably
current release notes file (RELEASE-NOTES-4.0-M3.txt) in the top-level
directory of the "jakarta-tomcat-4.0" source tree that documents what
has changed (since M2) so far.

One feature that is planned for m3, but not yet available in the CVS
sources (Pier is working hard on it :-) is a new web connector to Apache
that understands what a web application is.  This will dramatically ease
the headaches of configuring the Apache connector for all the things
that are already specified in the web.xml file.

NOTE 1:  This connector code should be considered EXPERIMENTAL at this
time -- it is definitely not ready for prime time, having been tested
only on Solaris8/x86 to date.  We're counting on some help from people
willing to try it out in other environments and provide bug reports.
Once it settles down, the ports to the other web servers will be added
as well.

NOTE 2:  It is quite likely that the new Filter API in the Servlet 2.3
public draft will be refined somewhat before final release.
Improvements to the model are being discussed in the JSR-053 expert
group, and will be implemented in Tomcat 4.0 as soon as they are settled
(almost certainly *after* m3 is created).  The changes are likely to
require small but necessary changes in every filter written to the
current API.

Craig McClanahan

====================
See you at ApacheCon Europe <http://www.apachecon.com>!
Session VS01 (23-Oct 13h00-17h00):  Sun Technical Briefing
Session T06  (24-Oct 14h00-15h00):  Migrating Apache JServ
                                    Applications to Tomcat

Re: Proposed Plan: Tomcat 4.0-m3 on Wednesday

["Pier P. Fumagalli" <pi...@betaversion.org>]

Craig R. McClanahan <Cr...@eng.sun.com> wrote:
> 
> One feature that is planned for m3, but not yet available in the CVS
> sources (Pier is working hard on it :-) is a new web connector to Apache
> that understands what a web application is.  This will dramatically ease
> the headaches of configuring the Apache connector for all the things
> that are already specified in the web.xml file.

Update on this... The connector is _COMPLETELY_ new... New protocol (it's a
phoenix resurrecting from the old AJPv21 ashes), and the whole module is
completely new (not a line of code from my old mod_jserv or mod_jk).
There's going to be an explaination on WHY this _HAD_ to be done (at least
from my point of view).

> NOTE 1:  This connector code should be considered EXPERIMENTAL at this
> time -- it is definitely not ready for prime time, having been tested
> only on Solaris8/x86 to date.  We're counting on some help from people
> willing to try it out in other environments and provide bug reports.
> Once it settles down, the ports to the other web servers will be added
> as well.

Uh... It is kinda tested also under MacOS/X, single processor, since that's
my development environment nowdays. As of _right_now_ I'm trying to abstract
the connection layer, so that it'll be easier to add load balancing and
connection encryption, and fighting with a couple of memory leaks and null
pointers... (segmentation fault... oh my god how I love JAVA!).

Also, I'm very sorry for not keeping the works in CVS, but I believe that on
a piece of code written from scratch, where files come and go, design gets
reconstructed once every two days, CVS is not the best solution...

    Pier