Any experiences with migration from Tomcat 5 to Tomcat 6?

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Hi rangers,

could anyone please share some practical experiences regarding migration issues when moving from Tomcat 5 to Tomcat 6? In particular I'm NOT interested in installation or configuration issues. Instead I'd just like to hear some experiences regarding web application issues.

From what I've already read in this forum and articles on the internet etc. there seem to be almost no changes which directly effect web application (I know there are always exceptions ;-)). Can anybody confirm this who has migrated a custom application from Tomcat 5 to 6?

Thanks in advance!

Marco

[Kees Jan Koster]

Dear Marco,

No issues. I use the two interchangeably.

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Hi Kees,

thanks for your quick reply! This is exactly my experience, too. I'm already using Tomcat 6 for the said application for quite a while but I wanted to hear some similar experiences before using it for a production environment. After reading up in the Tomcat documentation most migration issues from version 5 to 6 seem to be related to installation or configuration but not really problems in the web applications themselves.

Marco

[Tim Holloway]

The only major difference that comes to mind is that EL's implementation is part of the Tomcat-supplied libraries in Tomcat6, so you don't - and shouldn't - include them in WARs they way you had to for Tomcat5.

Technically, I believe that the older server/common/system library directories were replaced with a single lib directory in Tomcat6, but that should have little impact on the webapps.

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Hi Tim,

our web app is only based on XML/XSL templates, so luckily EL doesn't have an impact anyway.

Technically, I believe that the older server/common/system library directories were replaced with a single lib directory in Tomcat6, but that should have little impact on the webapps.

That's correct and explained in the Tomcat documentation. Without explicit configuration changes Tomcat 6 only uses a "lib" directory in the base directory. But from what I read this shouldn't affect most web applications unless they expect a special behavior for class loading etc. At least with our web application there was nothing to do but to put all library JARs inside the /lib where they can be shared among all applications running in this container.

Marco

[Bear Bibeault]

None. All I changed was configuration.