Tomcat 7 Additional features

Here are the some of the additional features of Tomcat 7 with previous versions

1) Embeddeding tomcat has become more easier than 6. This helps in integration tests

2) Tomcat cache control - Tomcat 7 provides you a ExpiresFilter that will determine the caching behavior of the clients. This filter controls the setting of the Expires HTTP header and the max-age directive of the Cache-Control HTTP header in server responses.

3) Tomcat 7 has the Servlet 3 specs. This allows the programmatic configuration includeing for elements in web.xml

4) error-on-undeclared-namespace - The default behavior when a tag with unknown namespace is used in a JSP page (regular syntax) is to silently ignore it. If this is set to true then an error must be raised during the translation time.

5) MemoryLeak protection -  It’s implemented as a listener which tries to detect and fix the possible memory leaks whenever it can

6) Tomcat 7 provides new aliases that allow storing static content outside the WAR File.

7) A new security feature for Apache Tomcat 7 is Session Fixation Protection. Essentially, when a user authenticates their session, Tomcat will change the session ID. It does not destroy the previous session , rather it renames it so it is no longer found by that ID. 

8) One of the new features with Tomcat 7 is a replacement to the commons-dbcp connection pool. While the commons-dbcp connection pool works fine for small or low traffic applications, it is known to have problems in highly concurrent environments .It is a completely new connection pool which has been written from the ground up, with a focus on highly concurrent environments and performance.

9) The Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) , is a binary protocol that can proxy inbound requests from a web server. Typically used in load balanced web applications where the web server has to pass requests to multiple application servers. New I/O, usually shortened to NIO, is a set of Java APIs that allow for more scalable I/O operations. Among other things, NIO provides support for non-blocking of data connections which ensures a response from the application server. Without NIO, admins must configure their web servers and application servers to match the number of threads between the web server and application server.

10) Adding of Crawler Session Manager Valve

11) Parallel deployment is supported

14) Use a LockOutRealm. Now standard by default in Tomcat 7, this realm simply protects your application from brute force attacks by locking out the offending account after a number of unsuccessful attempts.

14) Access log enabled by default

15) Instead of using a path of "/foo" like Tomcat 6 did, Tomcat 7 will add a trailing slash to the cookie path, or "/foo/".  This can be disabled, it turns out, by setting the sessionCookiePathUsesTrailingSlash flag to "false" on the <Context> element –

16) Jarscanner element was added which will scan all the jars in the web application lib location. This can be disabled by adding scanpath=false in context.xml

17) useHttpOnly set to false in 6 and true in 7

18)  Tomcat 7 has File upload support will enable Tomcat users to use file upload functionality within their web applications with the need for additional libraries

19) Tomcat 7 manager application has a ‘find Leak’ Button which enables a Full GC and also finds the leaks.

20) Deploying from Command line is changed by adding a “text” like

http://{host}:{port}/manager/text/{command}?{parameters}

Hope this Helps, More to come.