A New Apache Tomcat Community: TomcatExpert.com

A new site launches today aiming to be the definitive resource for developers who want to run Apache Tomcat in large scale production environments. Sponsored by SpringSource, tomcatexpert.com will provide a central point for the Tomcat community.

Apache Tomcat is the  is the world’s most widely used Java application server, powering at least 75% of all Java-based websites. With more than two-thirds of large enterprises relying on Java applications to power their business, and constant pressure to provide infrastructure that is cost-effective, and easily supportable.

“To show our continued support for Apache Tomcat technologies, SpringSource has created a one-stop-shop for Apache Tomcat users to gain access to expert resources, discussion topics and technical support,” said Matt Stodolnic, senior director of marketing for SpringSource, a division of VMware. “TomcatExpert.com will give its users an insight into the tips and tricks to make management and administration of Apache Tomcat easier, faster and more productive.”

Considering Tomcat's popularity, there is a lot of expertise across the internet, but there is no single source for all this knowledge. TomcatExpert will provide a complimentary community to apache.org, which provides documentation and mailing lists for Apache Tomcat. TomcatExpert will be very focussed on supporting enterprise users.

Having acquired Covalent in the past, SpringSource have taken over the provision of professional support for Tomcat. Much of the company expertise is being poured into a public site for the first time. SpringSource has a long history of being a principal contributor to the Apache Tomcat project, with SpringSource employees having been  responsible for 95 percent of the bug fixes to Apache Tomcat in the past two years and are also currently leading the community project for Tomcat 7.0, due out this spring.  

Site content will be managed by a team of Apache Tomcat committers and recognized Java development experts from several companies. Membership is free to join, and members are encouraged to comment and contribute content, including questions for Contributors to answer. The site format for TomcatExpert.com breaks content into three sections:

• Blog
  Best practices, insights and news on the latest innovations and deployments using Apache Tomcat directly from our team of Contributors. Initial topics will include high concurrency connection pooling, a detailed series on cost justification, assessing candidates and moving applications from a commercial JEE app server to Tomcat, analysis of management and operations tools, as well as publicizing the features and thought behind Tomcat 7.
• Knowledge Base
  Published history of over 10 years of common enterprise customer support cases.from the SpringSource archive.
• Ask the Expert
  Forum where enterprise users submit questions to be answered directly by the Tomcat Expert Contributors. This is different from the Apache mailing lists in that the question queue is not open for anyone to answer. Only contributors, our validated Tomcat Experts, will provide the answer, so answers you get will come from a qualified expert. Comments are open for the community to weigh in, of course.