On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Turner, John wrote:

This is not actually true in the legal sense, or really any longer relevant in the practical sense.

In the legal sense, Tomcat code is *used in* the reference implementation for J2EE, which has been the official RI to date for the servlet and JSP specs. Tomcat by itself is not, and never has been, the "official" RI. It is now possible, though (thanks to the JCP modifications championed by Apache, and announced at JavaOne 2002), to certify that Tomcat officially conforms to the specs -- but it is till not, on its own, the RI.

In a practical sense, way to many people have invested way too much time in adding high qualify features and performance improvements to Tomcat to think of it as "just" a reference implementation. Tomcat generally gets in the neighborhood of 80k downloads per month, just off of Apache's main web site. I suspect that more than a few of those downloads end up on production servers for mission critical applications :-).

By the way, there is no such thing as a "be-all, end-all" solution to any complex problem, commercial or otherwise :-).

Craig