Is Tomcat backward compatible?

Question

I have few .WAR files that run on a tomcat 5.5 instance. So probably they would be Servlet Specification 2.3 or something not sure.

And I also have a new .WAR that is built with Servlet Spec 3.0 and needs tomcat7.

So my question is.. Can I deploy the old tomcat 5.5 .WARs in the tomcat7 instance?

So this way I'll have only ONE tomcat instance running. i.e. a Tomcat 7 that runs old and new WARs as well. Is this practical ?

Edit:: And how can I make tomcat7 run these old tomcat 5.5 applications, if at all this is possible ?

Answer 1

Yes,it should have the minimum tomcat version as per the guidelines.

http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/Specifications