Apache has announced the release of Tomcat 11, as well as marking the 25th anniversary of the first commit to the Apache Tomcat source code repository since becoming an ASF project.

Apache Tomcat is an open source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Server Pages, Jakarta Expression Language, Jakarta WebSocket, Jakarta Annotations and Jakarta Authentication specifications, all of which are part of the Jakarta EE platform, which is itself the evolution of the Java EE platform. A reported 60% of developers regularly use Tomcat as their chosen application server, according to a survey of more than 26,000 developers worldwide

Java 21 is now the supported versions of Tomcat 11. This is a significant change from Tomcat 10.1 which supported Java 11+ .

The headline improvements to Tomcat 11 start with fixes and improvements for WebDAV, along with improvements to the recently adding request/response recycling for HTTP/2, and support for virtual threads.  Introduced in JDK 21, virtual threads are lightweight threads that reduce the effort of writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput concurrent applications. The feature offers an alternative to Tomcat's standard thread pool which until now has been used for allocating platform and operating system kernel threads. 

WebDav improvements and fixes include better handling of headers in the WebdavServlet; and correctly returning the order of entires in a multi-status response to a WebDAV. Multi-status responses when deleting a collection via WebDAV fails has also been improved, along with path handling.

The new release also adds support for automatic reloading of updated TLS keys and certificates with zero downtime. The team says this will allow for easy integration with LetsEncrypt, significantly simplifying the process to renew TLS certificates. Support has also been added for utilizing OpenSSL for TLS via Java’s new FFM API. The Tomcat developers say this provides a more reliable and easy to use mechanism for integrating Tomcat with OpenSSL.

WebSockets support has also been improved with better performance and scalability due to the WebSocket API being upgraded to Jakarta WebSocket 2.2.

Tomcat 11 is available now.

More Information

Tomcat Website

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