Tomcat6 and Java 7

[Richard T Green]

Are there any known issues with running Tomcat 6 and Java 7? Our organization recently pushed out the Java 1.7.0_51 update and I was advised to upgrade to Tomcat 7. I have been running Tomcat 6 with previous versions of Java 1.7.0_xx without any issues. When asked why, I was informed that Apache "strongly recommends running Tomcat 7 with Java 1.7." If upgrading to Tomcat 7 is required, that is fine but I was unable to find any documentation stating incompatibility issues with my current setup. Before upgrading or making any changes at my company, it's a long process so I would love to be able to stay on Tomcat 6 for as long as possible.

Can anyone confirm if Tomcat 7 is actually required or is it recommended with Java 1.7?
Any known issues?

Thank you,
Rich

[Paul Clapham]

Hi Richard, welcome to the Ranch!

I can't really give you any direct advice there, except to note that "strongly recommends" falls short of "requires". However I would recommend that you start the process to upgrade to Tomcat 7 anyway. As a general rule it's a good idea to be running a fairly recent version of software -- not necessarily the current version, though. Otherwise after a while you'll find yourself running software which is obsolete and having to jump over several generations to get back to current levels. I've been there, not because of onerous paperwork but just because of lethargy, and I can tell you that can be a pain.

Of course there is the possibility that if you used the "small but frequent update" strategy then you would be spending too much of your time wading through your company's process -- you would be able to gauge that better than I can.

Also I would guess that if Tomcat 6 worked with earlier Java 7 versions then it's going to work with the latest version too, since as far as I can see the latest changes seem to concentrate on application security and therefore shouldn't affect you.

[Ulf Dittmer]

I've seen anecdotal reports of problems (some of which you can find by searching for "tomcat 6 java 7 problem"). It's all a bit vague, but a few too many to suggest that there are no issues at all.

[Tim Holloway]

Tomcat 6 has had its share of problems, although it's a pretty solid version overall.

A bigger reason to consider Tomcat 7 is that Tomcat 8 is probably going to go live soon, and even though you may not want to live that close to the bleeding edge, the older your Tomcat, the less overall support you'll find for it.

DIsclaimer: almost all of my servers are still on Tomcat 6, but that's mostly a "ain't broke/don't fix" situation. I really should be converting them.

The biggest reason for favoring Tomcat 7 has to do with the fact that it supports newer JEE standards than Tomcat6 does, including nio and websockets. It should have better performance as well, although I have no benchmarks to confirm this.

[Richard T Green]

Thank you everyone for the quick replies! I made the request to go to Tomcat 7 but that could be a long process for my company and Tomcat 15 may be out by then. =)

I do have another question but I will post that under a new topic. Thanks again for the help!