The Tomcat projects started at
Sun Microsystems as the reference implementation of the Java Servlet and
Java Server Pages Specifications. The
Java Community Process (JCP)
site contains all the details of those specifications.
The Tomcat code base was donated by Sun to the Apache Software Foundation in 1999, and
the first Apache release was version 3.0. Since then, multiple volunteers from Sun and
numerous other organizations have contributed to the product. There have been
multiple major releases and the product has enjoyed
considerable industry adoption as well as a healthy and active community.
In 2005, Tomcat became its own top-level Apache project, leaving the Jakarta umbrella
and oversight structure to manage itself.
