Tomcat upgradation

Question

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 :)

Answer 1

Go to Java (1.)6; it really makes doing web services like yours easier and it's really widely available now.

Answer 2

If you are going to upgrade I would recommend first doing some tests with java 6 + the existing codebases. If that seems to work, go to Tomcat 6.

Perhaps also upgrade some Axis libraries while you're at it, or leave it as is if it still works.

In my experience you can get to trouble by migrating to Java 5 (and thus 6), especially with XML. My memory has something like a class name clash between Java 5 and an old version of Xerces, but I could be mistaken.

Answer 3

Tomcat 6.0.26 is the latest stable release.

It requires JRE 5.0 or later, so if you are truly stuck on 1.4, you'll need to download the latest 5.5 release, which requires a compatability package to run on 1.4.

My advice: bite the bullet and make the necessary changes for your application to function on 1.6. It is only going to get more and more painful to upgrade (and to continue to code in 1.4) as time goes on.