Upgrade Tomcat to which version?

[Arnav Velimala]

We are planning to upgrade our Tomcat from 4.1.31.

Our's is an Axis 1.4 application where we have our web services.

Request you to suggest the latest stable version of Tomcat 5 or Tomcat 6 suitable for our application. And the things to consider while upgrading.

Will the existing 1.4 Java code base works smoothly on Tomcat 5 or 6?

And going further we may write the code in JDK 1.5 as well. So, having Java 1.4 code and Java 1.5 code together, will create any problems?

Kindly suggest.

Please share your upgradation experiences.

Thank You

[Tim Holloway]

Unlike Microsoft's offerings, Java is intensely engineered to ensure backwards compatibility. Except in very rare cases, taking code that was developed for Java 1.4 and running it under a Java 5 or 6 VM should not make any difference whatsoever. And in the rare cases where it does, it's likely that the code wasn't really clean even for Java 1.4.

Tomcat 5.0 runs under Java 1.4, but I don't recommend that. Tomcat 5.5 runs under Java 1.5. In most cases, I recommend going straight to Tomcat 6, however. Do be aware that there are some small differences in setup for Tomcat 6, though. Most notably, instead of 3 library directories, Tomcat 6 has only 1.

Returning to the primary question, once you start running in a Java 5 environment, as long as you compile for Java 1.5 or later, the Java 1.4 code will just be Java 5 code that doesn't use Java 5 features as far as the system is concerned.

[Arnav Velimala]

Well Said !!

Thank you for the clarifications

Lemme try on Tomcat 6 and JDK 1.6.

Will soon share my experiences.

thanks.

[Kees Jan Koster]

Please keep in mind that Java 1.5 has been EOSL for months. Leave it behind you and look at today.

Kees Jan

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Kees,

Did you mean to link to the EOL Policy page?

Regards, Andrew

[Kees Jan Koster]

D'oh! Corrected the link. Thanks.