Apache Tomcat 7 Released

Apache Tomcat 7 was just recently announced – or more specifically, Tomcat 7.0.0.

Apache Tomcat 7 is the first release of the 7.x series, and thus the Apache Group does not recommend adopting it for business use yet. The code changes that went into Tomcat 7 are so extensive that they would like to have some real-world (but not production) testing first.

Documentation for Tomcat 7.x is available, and Tomcat 7 has its own dedicated download page as well.

Tomcat 7 is the first version to support Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and Expression Language (EL) 2.2.

Java SE 6 is required to run Tomcat 7, but the JDK is not needed; since Tomcat 5.5, only the JRE is required as Tomcat comes bundled with the Eclipse JDT Java compiler to compile JSPs.

OpenVMS runs Tomcat as part of the Secure Web Server (SWS) product. HP-UX has Tomcat as well as Apache Cocoon (now at version 2.2.0 and with a 3.0 Alpha out). Ubuntu has both Tomcat 5 and Tomcat 6.

I just hope that adoption of Tomcat 7 does not follow the pattern of KDE; KDE 4.0 was roundly taken up by all major KDE platforms in spite of the warnings given by the KDE team. Yet, I expect Tomcat 7 to be more reliable than KDE 4 was.

If you have questions about Tomcat, you could always go to ServerFault and ask away. However, there is also a Tomcat-specific source – TomcatExpert.com. Why not try both?

Why Tomcat won’t start (with error in dependencyCheck)

Under HP-UX (and apparently several other systems, including Windows), Cocoon won’t start up.  Cocoon is an XML-based system that implements the “separation of concerns” for web development and runs on top of Tomcat.

The Tomcat error logs (located in $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.out) report the following:

SEVERE: Error in dependencyCheck
java.util.zip.ZipException: invalid entry size (expected 2472738816 but got 48 bytes)

Checking and rechecking the cocoon.war file reports no errors – and checking all of the *.jar files located in cocoon/WEB-INF/lib report no errors. There is has been much discussion about this specific error in various mail files, and someone even put it into the Cocoon FAQ on their wiki (without a satisfactory answer).

The only hint of a resolution was one message that suggested that the batik-all-1.5b2.jar file was corrupted. The Windows-based 7zip reported no errors on batik-all-1.5b2.jar (at 2080760 bytes), but extracting and repacking Batik (with 7zip on Windows XP Professional) fixed the problem. The repacked batik-all-1.5b2.jar was 2075222 bytes, and now it works.

Apparently this error has been around for quite some time (months at least); why it exists in HP-UX 11i v3 is beyond me.