Yearly Archives: 2011

Opinion

Tomcat 7 Hosting

Apache Tomcat 7
Tomcat 7 Hosting from 2020Media

Work started on Tomcat version 7 in Jan 2009, and almost 2 years to the day, the stable release of Tomcat 7 has been announced.

2020Media is proud to announce it’s support for the new Tomcat version on both Java Premium and Java Dedicated hosting packages. The packages offer some of the most powerful and most-asked for features of any hosting services in the world – complete control over Tomcat via SSH. Live logs, Dedicated MySQL servers, and of course, our unsurpassed knowledge and expertise in Tomcat web hosting.

Tomcat 7 Features

Exciting new features in our Tomcat 7 Hosting plans include:

  • Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and EL 2.2 specification support
  • Hugely improved memory leak prevention and detection
  • Simplified embedding. Utilizing a new API, developers only need a few lines of code to get Tomcat running within their applications.
  • Improved assistance in stability, performance, and application cleanup
  • Logging: Tomcat 7 includes two improvements to its logging system: a single line log formatter to make log files easier to read and an asynchronous file handler.
  • Servlet 3.0’s asynchronous support has been fully implemented in Tomcat 7.

Upgrading

Opinion amongst Tomcat experts is that there are no significant obstacle to upgrading applications (as opposed to re-writing applications). See http://tomcat.apache.org/migration.html for help when you start this process and also see Mark Thomas’s blog for some additional info.

We’ve heard that after upgrade applications are at least as stable and even just a touch faster.

Start Using Tomcat 7 Today

Setup a Tomcat 7 hosting account with 2020Media and you could be enjoying the benefits of the latest release today. Or Contact Us to find out more about what we offer.

Opinion

Joomla User Group January

With the release of Joomla 1.6 just announced the question on everyone’s lips was: “Should I upgrade?”. After some discussion the group decided that at this point, an upgrade should not be done to an existing site. Only if a new site was being built should Joomla 1.6 be used.

Joomla 1.5 will be fully supported for at least 1 year, so there is time for the new release to settle in, and perhaps easy upgrade tools will be developed.
Some of the developers at the meeting also said they’d not be using Joomla 1.6 just yet as it was likely to contain some bugs and they’d wait for Joomla 1.6.4 (or thereabouts) to be released.

The discussion on Joomla 1.6 moved on to Molajo, which is a package of Joomla components plus some coding changes over the standard Joomla. Molajo was set up fairly recently by some of the people who have had a lot of involvment in Joomla.  It remains to be seen whether it will develop into a true fork of Joomla, or if the features tried out and testing in Molajo will make their way back to the core. Check out Nooku framework too.

The main presentation described how to get started with creating a new Joomla template. Melvyn Phillips showed how to use an off-the-shelf CSS framework to quickly put together a grid based site. Given the complexity of Joomla, creating a new template may seem offputting to many. Melvyn showed us how to create a basic 3 column template from scratch in just 5 minutes.

2020Media was recently asked to take over hosting of a legacy Joomla 1.0 website and we completed the migration successfully this week. The customers website had been broken because their host upgraded their server to a new version of PHP without telling them. At 2020Media we never do this.

For any enquiries about Joomla 1.5, 1.6 or even 1.0, please contact us.

Opinion

2011 Look Ahead

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Predictions for 2011

What will the year 2011 bring in the hosting and domain name world? Here are some predictions for the next 12 months.

  • Joomla 1.6 will be released. Version 1.5 of the free content mangement system was released in 2006 and it looks like finally a new release is imminent.
  • Tomcat 7 will come out of beta. Tomcat 7 promises Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 and EL 2.2 implementation, plus a focus on improved security.
  • A large number of new domain name extensions will get the go ahead at ICANN, although .xxx may not.
  • Drupal 7 will be the most popular release of this already very successful content management system.
  • Junk e-mail (SPAM) will continue to blight the Inboxs of email users. WebSense reports 8 of 10 messages are Spam. Messaging between individuals via non-email methods such as Facebook will rise. Users will turn to service providers for server-side mailbox filtering.
  • New internet infrastructure advances such as DNSSEC and IPv6 will go onto business managers “must-have” list when procuring new services.

These are just a few of the changes we’ll probably see in the coming year. Virtualisation and Cloud computing will continue to influence every aspect of computing and the number of people using the internet consciously and unconsciously will continue to rise. 2011 could see the number of internet connected devices (“the Internet of things”) exceed the world population for the first time [1],[2].