Recently I watched this webinar about Tomcat 7 presented by Mark Thomas and would like to share my thoughts on the subject and what I’ve learned. Servlet 3.0 The most prominent change is the support of Servlet 3.0 specification which supports such great features as asynchronous servlets – not used by default web-fragment.xml – you can specify parts of the configuration in your libraries which you plan to reuse The effective deployment descriptor (web.

The Environment From time to time I need to do some Apache httpd + Tomcat installations on Linux servers and usually they come in different flavors. While you’re still experimenting it’s a good idea to use a pre-installed Linux on a virtual machine. I’m using the free VMware player to run virtual appliances, a list of which can be found on VMware page. Personally I like the clean Linux installations without any extras, this way you can install anything you need and create multiple virtual machines of the same Linux flavor with different purposes if you need to.

A little while ago I was developing a small application from which I wanted to reuse the Spring beans that are defined in a context of another application. I thought this might be useful for someone so here’s a short explanation of how I achieved this result. Both applications were deployed on Tomcat 6.0.18, but I don’t think that minor version number differences would have much of an impact on the technique.