Where to Get Tomcat

The Tomcat Web site is at http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat.

To download Tomcat, click the Binaries link under Download on the left side of the page. Unless you are really adventurous, you should stick with the release builds. These have been tested thoroughly and deemed to be relatively stable. The milestone builds typically have newer features and bug fixes but haven't been tested enough to be considered a release. The nightly builds are snapshots of the very latest version of the code. Because a number of developers are working on Tomcat, you might find that the nightly builds vary greatly in quality as new changes make their way into the code. It often takes several iterations before a new set of changes becomes stable.

Several versions of Tomcat are available. Each major release implements a different combination of JSP and servlet specifications. To run the examples in this book, you need Tomcat 5.0, which supports the JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 specifications.

When you click the Release Builds link, after you move to the bin/ directory, you get a list of files to download. Some releases have a Lightweight Edition (LE). If you're using JDK 1.4 or greater, you can use the Lightweight Edition (LE), which eliminates many of the libraries that are a part of the JDK 1.4 distribution. For the most part, the LE edition has been discontinued from recent builds. You should select a standard distribution.

You'll want to select a file that is right for your system. For Windows, you can choose a version with an installer or a plain zipped file. If you're using Linux, pick the file that you can uncompress with the utilities on your system.