The Apache Tomcat Project is proud to announce the next release candidate for Apache Tomcat 8 – 8.0.0-RC3 (alpha). Tomcat 8 is aligned with Java EE 7. In addition to supporting updated versions of the Java EE specifications, Tomcat 8 includes a number of improvements compared to Tomcat 7. The notable changes include:

• Support for Java Servlet 3.1, JavaServer Pages 2.3, Java Unified Expression Language 3.0 and Java WebSocket 1.0.
• The default connector implementation is now the Java non-blocking implementation (NIO) for both HTTP and AJP.
• A new resources implementation that replaces Aliases, VirtualLoader, VirtualDirContext, JAR resources and external repositories with a single, consistent approach for configuring additional web application resources. The new resources implementation can also be used to implement overlays (using a master WAR as the basis for multiple web applications that each have their own customizations).

Apache Tomcat 8.0.0-RC3 includes numerous fixes for issues identified in RC1 as well as a number of other enhancements and changes. The notable changes since RC1 include:

• Switch to UFT-8 by default for connectors and example web applications.
• Switch to the asynchronous logger and one line formatter by default.
• Add Servlet 3.1 non-blocking IO support to the AJP connectors.

Full details of these changes, and all the other changes, are available in the Tomcat 8 changelog.

The purpose of this release candidate is to give users an opportunity to test Tomcat 8 and provide feedback to the Tomcat community. It has been given an alpha status which means that it is not judged as being ready for production usage. The implementations of the 4 Java EE 7 specifications are all complete but there is some internal refactoring to be completed before the alpha label is removed.

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