If you are a Java web developer, it is most likely that you are aware of the popularity of Tomcat web server. Tomcat is the Reference Implementation (RI) for the JSP and Servlets specification from the beginning. Not only that, many of the application servers internally using the Tomcat as their web server since it already provides the best implementation. The last stable release is Tomcat 7.0. At present Tomcat 8.0 is in the development release and it is expected to be made available for the production use anytime soon. This new version supports many of the new Java EE specifications out of the box. This tutorial highlights the main features in this release.
Tomcat 8.0 release aligns with the Java EE 7 Specification
- It supports Java Servlet 3.1
- Java Server Pages (JSP) 2.3
- Java Unified Expression Language (EL) 3.0
- Java WebSocket 1.0
Also look at the previous releases and what it supports:
- Tomcat 7: Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, and EL 2.2.
- Tomcat 6: Servlet 2.5, JSP 2.1, and EL 2.1.
The below table summarizes the over all detail and support for each release.
| Servlet Spec | JSP Spec | EL Spec | WebSocket Spec | Apache Tomcat version | Actual release revision | Minimum Java Version |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | 2.3 | 3.0 | 1.0 | 8.0.x | 8.0.0-RC10 (alpha) | 1.7 |
| 3.0 | 2.2 | 2.2 | 1.0 | 7.0.x | 7.0.50 | 1.6 (WebSocket 1.0 requires 1.7) |
| 2.5 | 2.1 | 2.1 | N/A | 6.0.x | 6.0.37 | 1.5 |
| 2.4 | 2.0 | N/A | N/A | 5.5.x (archived) | 5.5.36 (archived) | 1.4 |
| 2.3 | 1.2 | N/A | N/A | 4.1.x (archived) | 4.1.40 (archived) | 1.3 |
| 2.2 | 1.1 | N/A | N/A | 3.3.x (archived) | 3.3.2 (archived) | 1.1 |
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