Feature List Tomcat 4.0 vs. Tomcat 3.x

[ma...@infineon.com]

Hi,
Could anyone point me to a feature list Tomcat 4.0 vs. Tomcat 3.x. In order to drive our development decisions in the right direction I need to know what additional features Tomcat 4.0 offers compared to Tomcat 3.x. Is this or will this be part of the forthcoming Tomcat 4.0 package?

Thanks
Marc

Re: Feature List Tomcat 4.0 vs. Tomcat 3.x

["Craig R. McClanahan" <cr...@apache.org>]

On Tue, 11 Sep 2001 marc.lehmann@infineon.com wrote:

> Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 17:12:58 +0200
> From: marc.lehmann@infineon.com
> Reply-To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
> To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
> Subject: Feature List Tomcat 4.0 vs. Tomcat 3.x
>
> Hi, Could anyone point me to a feature list Tomcat 4.0 vs. Tomcat 3.x.
> In order to drive our development decisions in the right direction I
> need to know what additional features Tomcat 4.0 offers compared to
> Tomcat 3.x. Is this or will this be part of the forthcoming Tomcat 4.0
> package?
>
> Thanks
> Marc
>

In my JavaOne session about Tomcat last June (Session #1287), I enumerated
the following list of new features in 4.0 versus 3.2 (I don't track 3.3,
so I don't know if it implements any of these):

* Access logs (like those produced by web servers)

* Common Gateway Interface (CGI) support (not enabled by default)

* Configurable user/roles database "Realm" at the engine, host,
  or context (web application) level

* Container-managed security supports DIGEST and CLIENT-CERT

* Default Context configuration lets you establish defaults for
  automatically configured web apps

* Embedability APIs for embedding Tomcat 4 inside other servers

* HTTP/1.1 full support in stand-alone mode

* JNDI naming context (compatible with J2EE standards) is supplied to
  web applications to provide access to information configured with
  <env-entry>, <resource-ref>, and <resource-enf-ref> in web.xml.
  (You can also create your own custom object factories)

* JSP 1.2 specification support

* "Manager" web application supports scripted application deployment
  and undeployment, without restarting Tomcat, via HTTP.

* MOD_WEBAPP web connector vastly simplifies configuration of Tomcat
  running behind a web server, because it reads web.xml and configures
  itself based on that

* Request Filters to accept or deny requests based on the remote
  client's host name or IP address

* "Run From WAR" lets you run a web app directly from a WAR file
  instead of taking the time to unpack it into a directory.  (Also
  runs faster because there is no need to check for modified resources).

* Server Side Includes (*.shtml) support (not enabled by default)

* Servlet 2.3 specification support

* Single Sign On support

* User Web Applications automatically configured from public_html
  directories, so URLs like "http://localhost:8080/~craigmcc" work

Things that are not finished but are being worked on:

* Performance improvements, especially in the HTTP stack

* Run on port 80 without being root

* JSP page compiler to generate smaller/faster servlets

As required by the Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specifications, Tomcat 4 also
supports all applications that are based on Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 unless
they were programmed with container-specific features.

Tomcat 4 is also the code base used inside the J2EE 1.3 reference
implementation from Sun, and will be the container for the Web Services
Pack release as well.

Craig McClanahan