Apache Tomcat 4.0, which implements the new features of the new Servlet 2.3 and JavaServer Pages (JSP) 1.2 specifications, was officially announced on September 17. This generation of Tomcat supports web applications built for the Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 specifications with no changes.

Servlets are similar to Java applets that are run on the server side. They are used for running interactive web applications. They are considered to be platform independent and to have improved performance over CGI programs.

JavaServer Pages (JSP) is an extension of servlets; they are used to generate webpage content using XML-like tags and scriplets written in Java.

The official Tomcat website is at http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/.

Information about the the Servlet 2.3 implementation can be found via http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/. And specifications for JavaServer Pages 1.2 are available via http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/.

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