Tomcat 5.5 and above doesn’t need the JDK

Most of us who install Tomcat on our development machines wouldn’t have noticed that Tomcat versions before 5.5 required the full blown Java Development Kit (JDK) to be installed on the machine. Just installing the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) wasn’t enough. The JDK is meant for developers to be able to compile Java programs, and has the development tools such as the compiler, debugger and other development libraries. Tomcat versions prior to 5.5 used the Java compiler that comes with the JDK to compile JSP pages at runtime and consequently required a full blown JDK.

Tomcat versions 5.5 and above have a Java compiler (the Eclipse JDT Java compiler) packaged along with it. Now, this is used to compile the JSP pages dynamically instead of the JDK compiler. Hence, it is enough if we just install JRE starting from Tomcat version 5.5 and above.

Ganeshji Marwaha

I spend my days as the Director of Technology for Mobility practice and help my clients design enterprise and consumer mobile strategies. Mobile Payments, Digital Wallet and Tokenization technologies are my areas of specialization

  • b mulert

    Will this only work on Intel platforms? How will they deal with those that want to deploy on PowerPC (AIX)?

  • Ganeshji Marwaha

    @bmulert – Why do you think the Eclipse JDT is unavailable for PowerPc?

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  • Will this only work on Intel platforms? How will they deal with those that want to deploy on PowerPC (AIX)?

  • Will this only work on Intel platforms? How will they deal with those that want to deploy on PowerPC (AIX)?

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  • Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts, but Tomcat is still a lovely software i think.

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