I'm a newbie, in general, not just with JForum so please bear with me. My task is to check the impacts if we migrate it to the latest Windows versions and integrate it with our application. I also need to check if I can safely migrate it (v2.1. to the latest JForum version (2.8.3). I read from the documentation that these are JForum's requirements:

Servlet 3.1 compatible servlet container running on Java 8, and one of a variety of databases to run on

Following the logic of a Servlet 3.1 compatible servlet container, the applicable Apache Tomcat (https://tomcat.apache.org/whichversion.html) would be Apache Tomcat 10.1.x. This version only supports Java 11 or higher. I find it inconsistent with the system requirement above which is Java 8. Can you kindly explain if the above is updated? Thank you.

Hi- I think you looked at the wrong column on that page. What it tells you is that any Tomcat version 8.0 or newer supports Servlets 3.1. I would advise to use 9.x or 10.1.x.

As to the Java version, JForum requires at least Java 8, and it runs fine under Java 11.

Be aware that starting with version 10, Tomcat implements JakarteEE servlets, not Javax servlets, so you will have to run JForum (which uses Javax servlets) in the webapps-jakartaee folder, as described in https://tomcat.apache.org/migration-10.html#Specification_APIs. if you want to avoid that, just use Tomcat 9.

Hello, thank you very much. May I ask if there's another way to check the current version of the JForum within the application server hosting it? Our JForum has been integrated with one of our web applications and is customized so I couldn't see the version at the bottom

If you're an admin of the JForum installation, check the Admin Control Panel. If it is set to check for new versions, it will tell you which one you have, and which one is the latest.

Alternatively, check the installed files - WEB-INF/config/SystemGlobals.properties has the version at the very end of the file.

I'll take a look at these! By the way, regarding the system requirements again: Servlet 3.1 compatible servlet container running on Java 8. Has this always been the requirement, even for much older versions like 2.1.x? Just asking because I'm trying to see if we'll need to do major changes if ever we upgrade the version.

Oops sorry! Just realized that this shouldn't be the case since our current tomcat is running on 5.5.12. A bit of a stupid question but just to confirm, it wouldn't be possible to retain the server (Windows 2003) and tomcat version (5.5.12) if we upgrade to the latest version (2.8.3) right? I'm prolly gonna have a lot of questions regarding the migration by then

We've upped the container and Java requirements at various points in time as older versions became obsolete, but we haven't documented which JForum version required what.

But all your software is so old that it doesn't matter much - compared to upgrading from Windows Server 2003, upgrading Java and TC should be a piece of cake (And as discussed above, TC 5.5 will not do - TC 8 is the minimum, and there is no good reason not to use TC 9.)

As to upgrading JForum, check out https://community.jforum.net/posts/list/285.page for the experience of someone going from 2.1 to the current version

Good day, thank you very much again for your help! By any chance, would it be possible to ask for a copy of the WAR files of the older versions like 2.1.8?

I'm not aware of a war archive of the original JForum (the versions that came before 2.2). You can find the final source code of version 2.1.8 by the original maintainer (Rafael Steil) at https://github.com/rafaelsteil/jforum2. From that, you can build the war.

I have a copy of jforum-2.1.8.zip, you can rename it as jforum-2.1.8.war.

Hello all! Thank you for your help again . I managed to repackage our old JForum into a WAR file and deploy it to the new server. We tested in the lower environments about different setups possible, because the version of the database (and server OS) needs to be upgraded.

We ended up making it work with JForum v. 2.1.8 set up in Apache Tomcat 5.5 (JDK 8 ) and with Oracle DB 19.21. All the functionalities were working still so we pushed it into PRD. Unfortunately, the DB connection pooling is failing to do its job which is to close idle connections or recycle them, given the timeout specified. The DB is getting an influx of blocking locks every day. Here's our database configuration:

<GlobalNamingResources>



    <Resource name="ciejforum/DataSource" auth="Container"

              type="javax.sql.DataSource"

              description="JDBC driver"

              url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@//prdserver.domain.internal:1521/prddb"

              driverClassName="oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver"

              username="" password="" maxActive="20"

              accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" maxIdle="10"

              maxWait="-1" removeAbandoned="true" removeAbandonedTimeout="600"

              factory="org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSourceFactory"

              defaultAutoCommit="true" />

Would you perhaps have an idea on why the pooling is experiencing issues? Figured that I'll also try and ask here because it's getting trickier, and there are no obvious clues in the logs

You may check this Tomcat 5.5 document for some description of DBCP:
https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/jndi-resources-howto.html
4. Configure Tomcat's Resource Factory

Some additional properties handle connection validation:

validationQuery - SQL query that can be used by the pool to validate connections before they are returned to the application. If specified, this query MUST be an SQL SELECT statement that returns at least one row.

validationQueryTimeout - Timeout in seconds for the validation query to return. Default: -1 (infinite)

testOnBorrow - true or false: whether a connection should be validated using the validation query each time it is borrowed from the pool. Default: true

testOnReturn - true or false: whether a connection should be validated using the validation query each time it is returned to the pool. Default: false