Blogging Techstacks

Apache Tomcat 7.0.20 Released

The Apache Tomcat team has released version 7.0.20 today.  This version contains bug fixes and the following new features and fixes (the highlights below were taken from the release announcement):

• JSP files with dependencies in JARs are no longer recompiled on every access thereby improving performance.
• Update to version 1.1.22 of the native component of the AJP and HTTP APR/native connectors.
• Update to Commons Daemon 1.0.7.
• Converted unit tests to JUnit 4.

The changelog provides more in-depth information on all the changes in this release and source and binaries of tomcat 7.0.20 are available for download from a tomcat mirror near you.

Tomcat Team Announces End-of-Life for Tomcat 5.5

Today, the Apache Tomcat team announced that tomcat 5.5 will no longer be actively maintained after September 30, 2012.  After this point in time, upgrades are highly unlikely except only in the case of dire security vulnerability.  

Three months later on December 31, 2012, almost all traces of tomcat 5.5's existence will be removed (except from svn archives).  This will include download and documentation links.  

First released in August of 2004, tomcat 5.5 has had a pretty good run—it being the first tomcat suitable for standalone deployments. Instead of sitting behind an apache httpd server, tomcat 5.5 could exist *as* the web server.  Hopefully, the tomcat team will host a proper eulogy.  :)

Gaelyk 1.0 Released

Guillaume Laforge announced the release of Gaelyk 1.0 a short while ago.  Head on over to the Gaelyk site for more information or grab the binaries from the download page.  The changelog in the release announcement lists the following changes:

GAE SDK updated to 1.5.2 and Groovy to 1.8.1 Introduction of a Query DSL for creating SQL-like queries against the datastore Updated template project with a Gradle build, the usage of Gradle GAE / Gaelyk plugins, and the support of Spock for testing Groovlets Introduction of the plugins page in the Gaelyk website, for referencing known plugins By annotating classes with GaelykBindings, the same services and variables are injected in your classes as properties, as the ones which are injected in Groovlets and templates The validation closures of the routes in your URL mapping have access to the request, so you can validate a URL depending on what's in your request (attribute, session, etc.) Added a DSLD file (DSL descriptor) for Eclipse for easing code-completion and navigation Added a get() method on Key, as well as on lists of keys Ability to convert lists to Keys Added two encoded string and key conversion utilities Additional datastore.get() methods to retrieve entities by their keys more concisely Problems with the recent XMPP support fixed Fixed inability to access the various services and variables from within binding/before/after blocks in plugin descriptors