The popular Java EE app server Tomcat has taken their up an incremental notch. Apache Tomcat has announced release 7.0.55 of the open-source application server – available for download here. This marks the 55th minor update to Tomcat 7, which made its stable release premiere in early 2011.

As in recent updates over the past months, most of the changes documented in this release include minor fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile, the Tomcat team is making progress on Tomcat 8, which emerged in its first stable release earlier in June. The new series gathered momentum back in April with a beta release featuring an Eclipse JDT compiler that supports Java 8.

The current stable version (8.0.9) adds fixes for Java 8 support, while adding new features like cross context session replication. The previous version boasted numerous improvements such as support for Java Servlet 3.1 and JavaServer Pages 2.3, as well as enhancements to the resources implementation.

Previous releases have also hinted at several ‘experimental’ new features to appear in the 8th edition, such as HTTP and AJP connectors based on NIO2. At the same time, the Spring Boot framework has also introduced support for the first stable Tomcat 8 release.

Last week, Tomcat was featured in ZeroTurnaround’s RebelLab’s list of ten technologies loved by modern developers. The technology, which first appeared in 1999, has established itself as the leading Java app server, with 50% of developers claiming they prefer it over alternatives like JBoss and Jetty, according to Rebellabs.

Teaser image: Funny male cat asking for a snack via Shutterstock / Copyright: Andrzej Tamawczyk