[ANN] Apache Tomcat 8.0.0-RC3 (alpha) available

[Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org>]

The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache
Tomcat 8.0.0-RC3 (alpha).

Apache Tomcat 8 is an open source software implementation of the Java
Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Unified Expression Language and Java
WebSocket technologies.

Apache Tomcat 8 is aligned with Java EE 7. In addition to supporting
updated versions of the Java EE specifications, Tomcat 8 includes a
number of improvements compared to Tomcat 7. The notable changes
include:

- Support for Java Servlet 3.1, JavaServer Pages 2.3, Java Unified
  Expression Language 3.0 and Java WebSocket 1.0.

- The default connector implementation is now the Java non-blocking
  implementation (NIO) for both HTTP and AJP.

- A new resources implementation that replaces Aliases, VirtualLoader,
  VirtualDirContext, JAR resources and external repositories with a
  single, consistent approach for configuring additional web
  application resources. The new resources implementation can also be
  used to implement overlays (using a master WAR as the basis for
  multiple web applications that each have their own
  customizations).


Apache Tomcat 8.0.0-RC3 includes numerous fixes for issues identified in
RC1 as well as a number of other enhancements and changes. The notable
changes since RC1 include:

- Switch to UFT-8 by default for connectors and example web
  applications.

- Switch to the asynchronous logger and one line formatter by default.

- Add Servlet 3.1 non-blocking IO support to the AJP connectors.


Please refer to the change log for the complete list of changes:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/changelog.html

The purpose of this release candidate is to give users an opportunity to
test Tomcat 8 and provide feedback to the Tomcat community. It has been
given an alpha status which means that it is not judged as being ready
for production usage. The implementations of the 4 Java EE 7
specifications are all complete but there is some internal refactoring
to be completed before the alpha label is removed.

Note: This version has 4 zip binaries: a generic one and three
      bundled with Tomcat native binaries for Windows operating systems
      running on different CPU architectures.

Downloads:
http://tomcat.apache.org/download-80.cgi

Migration guides from Apache Tomcat 5.5.x, 6.0.x and 7.0.x:
http://tomcat.apache.org/migration.html

Enjoy!

- The Apache Tomcat team