New Version of the Tomcat 7 Clickstack
We are delighted at CloudBees to announce the new release of our Tomcat 7 ClickStack. The major enhancements are:
Private Application Mode
The main new feature is the support of Private Application Mode , which allows you to restrict access to your application with a simple configuration flag. This feature is particularly useful for testing and staging environments, as well as for activities such as “Friends & Family” validation of a website before launch, in which you need to limit access to specific roles (management, marketing/PR teams, etc.).
We listened to your requests for enhancements and we brought several of them to the Private Application mode that existed on the CloudBees Tomcat 6 ClickStack:
- The authentication no longer relies on CloudBees Account credentials but on a per-application secret. This capability will allow you to get a finer granularity on who is allowed to access what, and you will no longer need to create CloudBees accounts for other users such as marketing agencies or managers who need to review an app before its public launch.
- To be human friendly and application friendly, we support 4 types of authentication: web form, basic authentication, http header and http paramete r. This functionality makes it easy to protect web-api style applications that are accessed by mobile apps or by other applications.
To enable the Private Application Mode, simply run the following CloudBees SDK commands on your Tomcat 7 app:
bees config:set -a myapp -R privateApp.secretKey=this_is_a_very_strong_secret_key
bees app:restart -a myapp
You will find all the documentation on ClickStack - Application Containers » Tomcat 7 ClickStack » Private Application.
You can also test this feature launching the CloudBees Tomcat 7 Private Application Clickstart.
Tomcat JDBC Pool
After many validation tests, we changed the default DataSource implementation on the Tomcat 7 ClickStack to the Tomcat JDBC Pool , which will offer you better performance and better management of the lifecycle of the connections than the historical Commons DBCP Pool .
In addition to enhanced performance for your applications, this pool allows finer control of the expiration of the connection and lets you definitively get rid of the stale connections issue that sometimes occurs after long inactivity of the applications.
You will benefit from the new DataSource pool just by restarting your Tomcat 7 application.
You will find all the documentation on ClickStack - Application Containers » Tomcat 7 ClickStack » Tomcat DataSource. Filip Hanik, the creator of the Tomcat JDBC Pool, has written many articles related to this DataSource Pool on the Tomcat Experts Blog .
Tomcat 7.0.42
We upgraded from Apache Tomcat 7.0.41 to 7.0.42. Please find the Tomcat change log here .
What's next?
We are working on:
- The ease of configuration of the http connector, its encoding and the ability to use the non-blocking connector; this feature is already available as described in the Tomcat 7 With NIO Connector ClickStart demo application
- The pluggability of IP filtering, both using the Tomcat Remote Address Valve and as a new feature of the "Private Application Mode"
- A Tomcat 8 ClickStack to let you test the brand new Apache Tomcat 8 - 8.0.0-RC1 (alpha)
Enjoy!
Cyrille Le Clerc
Elite Architect
CloudBees
cloudbees.com
Cyrille Le Clerc is an elite architect at CloudBees, with more than 12 years of experience in Java technologies. He came to CloudBees from Xebia, where he was CT
Stay up to date
We'll never share your email address and you can opt out at any time, we promise.