The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 8.0.0-RC1 (alpha).
Apache Tomcat 8 is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Unified Expression Language and Java WebSocket technologies. Apache Tomcat 8 is aligned with Java EE 7. In addition to supporting updated versions of the Java EE specifications, Tomcat 8 includes a number of improvements compared to Tomcat 7. The notable changes include: - Support for Java Servlet 3.1, JavaServer Pages 2.3, Java Unified Expression Language 3.0 and Java WebSocket 1.0. - The default connector implementation is now the Java non-blocking implementation (NIO) for both HTTP and AJP. - A new resources implementation that replaces Aliases, VirtualLoader, VirtualDirContext, JAR resources and external repositories with a single, consistent approach for configuring additional web application resources. The new resources implementation can also be used to implement overlays (using a master WAR as the basis for multiple web applications that each have their own customizations). Please refer to the change log for the complete list of changes: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/changelog.html The purpose of this release candidate is to give users an opportunity to test Tomcat 8 and provide feedback to the Tomcat community. It has been given an alpha status which means that it is not judged as being ready for production usage. The implementations of the 4 Java EE 7 specifications are all complete but there is some internal refactoring to be completed before the alpha label is removed. Note: This version has 4 zip binaries: a generic one and three bundled with Tomcat native binaries for Windows operating systems running on different CPU architectures. Downloads: http://tomcat.apache.org/download-80.cgi Migration guides from Apache Tomcat 5.5.x, 6.0.x and 7.0.x: http://tomcat.apache.org/migration.html Enjoy! - The Apache Tomcat team