There is a leak with tomcat 6, so I am upgrading to tomcat 7.082 which uses servlet api 3.0.
I have deployed the war file which uses servlet 2.5 to Apache tomcat 7.0.82. the app is running is fine and i do not see any immediate issues.
so my question is, is it OK to do this? I will eventually be rolling out this change to production...
Tomcat 7 will run a Servlet 2.5 application just fine. The biggest thing is to make sure your web.xml specifies the version. So, for your example, it would look something like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
version="2.5">
...
</web-app>
This tells the container (Tomcat in this case) that this web application follows the Servlet 2.5 spec.