"This is the first stable release of the Tomcat 7 branch," developer Mark Thomas wrote in an e-mail announcing the release on various Tomcat developer mailing lists.

While not a full application server, Tomcat implements the functionality described in the Java Enterprise Edition Web profile specifications. Most notably, it supports version 3.0 of the Servlet API (application programming interface) and version 2.2 of JavaServer Pages, both part of the recently ratified JEE 6. A servlet container manages Java-based applications that can be accessed from a Web browser.

The use of Servlet 3.0 will bring a lot of new capabilities to Tomcat, noted Tomcat contributor Tim Funk, in a presentation at the ApacheCon conference in Atlanta in November.

One big area of improvement is in configuration management for Web applications. Previous versions required all Web app configuration changes to be entered in a central file called web.xml, a process that led to unwieldy web.xml files as well as security risks.