Hi,

Unfortunately, it's not possible to deploy JForum on a Tomcat version 10.x or v11.x instance since JForum only support up to Java/Jakarta EE 8.
This means that we are forced to use Tomcat version 9.0.98 (Java 8 and later) which is next in queue to be deprecated and unsupported. That is not good.

When I start up the Catalina container, I get the following exception:
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet

The technical reason is that during the step from Java/Jakarta EE 8 to Jakarta EE 9 all javax.* packages have been renamed to jakarta.* packages. So there is no backwards compatibility anymore since Jakarta EE 9.

It is however very easy to fix. Just replace the javax.servlet.* imports in the JForum code by jakarta.servlet.*:

import jakarta.servlet.*;

import jakarta.servlet.http.*;

Do you have any plans on upgrading (or forking) JForum to support the newer Tomcat versions (Jakarta EE 9)?
It would be very much appreciated. Trust me.

Thanks!

Regards,
Tommy

It is not as simple as that. JForum has various dependencies, some of which are also based on javax packages rather than jakarta ones. (Commons FileUpload comes to mind right away, although that one does have a Jakarta version.)

But it's not clear that a new version is needed. Some time ago, JForum ran fine in Tomcat's webapps-javaee folder; have you tried that?

Unfortunately not. I have JForum embedded in my own web app, which I have already updated to Jakarta EE 9 since I want to utilize the latest spec.

But I don't understand why you don't upgrade JForum? How will you manage security vulnerabilities in Java EE 8 when it's not supported anymore? It also depends on other legacy third parties. That's a bit strange since it's a dead end.

Regarding "commons-fileupload", there seem to be an already patched version available. It was mentioned in the link you posted in your previous message:
https://community.jforum.net/posts/list/257.page

Even better, there is a public Apache release available with support for Servlet 6 (which uses Jakarta EE).
https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-fileupload/commons-fileupload2-jakarta-servlet6/project-info.html
https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/org.apache.commons/commons-fileupload2-jakarta

/Tommy

But I don't understand why you don't upgrade JForum? How will you manage security vulnerabilities in Java EE 8 when it's not supported anymore?

We certainly will at some point. It's mostly a matter of time and priorities. TC 9 will likely be supported for a few more years, and currently JForum runs fine on TC 10 with the webapps-javaee mechanism, AFAIK. So there is no pressing need. Your use case is a bit of an outlier in that respect. This doesn't mean it'll be years before a JakartaEE version comes out, though. Just that we have nothing to announce right now.

But we also need to consider hosting, which in places is restricted to Java 8, meaning TC 9 (for example, on this very host). That would need to be updated in order to run the latest JForum, which we would want to do - we wouldn't want to maintain builds for different API levels.

there is a public Apache release available with support for Servlet 6 (which uses Jakarta EE).

We're aware of that, as I had mentioned above. That was just an example.