Java News from Sunday, October 31, 2004

The Jakarta Apache Project has posted Tomcat 5.5.4, an open source servlet container for the Apache web server and the official reference implementation of the Java Servlet API and Java Server Pages (JSP). "Tomcat 5.5 is designed to run on J2SE 5.0 and later, and requires configuration to run on J2SE 1.4....In addition, Tomcat 5.5 uses the Eclipse JDT Java compiler for compiling JSP pages. This means you no longer need to have the complete Java Development Kit (JDK) to run Tomcat, but a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is sufficient. The Eclipse JDT Java compiler is bundled with the binary Tomcat distributions. Tomcat can also be configured to use the compiler from the JDK to compile JSPs, or any other Java compiler supported by Apache Ant." This implements version 2.4 of the Java Servlet API and version 2.0 of Java Server Pages. Changes since 5.5.3 consist of bug fixes. The version numbering is funky. This is really more like an alpha release and is definitely not considered to be ready for production.