I'm working on further DRY'ing up the Tomcat container code, continuing the work done in ARQ-598 and ARQ-600. The Tomcat 5.5 managed container is the only Tomcat 5.5.x container that has been requested or implemented (per ARQ-597), and it's a bit different from the others:

• Tomcat 5.5.x implements the the Servlet 2.4 spec. The earliest Arquillian protocol is Servlet 2.5. While the Arquillian Servlet 2.5 protocol has been shown to work with Tomcat 5.5.x, the test archives themselves should really be Servlet 2.4-based. That introduces a dependency conflict on the Servlet APIs.
• It's not supported by any version of Weld, which means its injection tests and related dependencies are different from those of every other Tomcat container implementation.

I'm finding these subtle differences are introducing impediments to sharing test and POM code between this particular container implementation and all the others. With extra effort I'm sure I can achieve some degree of reuse, and otherwise this container could just fork it's own code, but I have to question whether either is worth the trouble? Tomcat 5.5 was end-of-life'd two years ago now.

Short of any strong objections I propose we drop support for this container going forward to better focus on Tomcat 6, 7 and 8. Anyone still using Tomcat 5.5 with Arquillian could continue to do so with org.jboss.arquillian.container:arquillian-tomcat-managed-5.5:1.0.0.CR7 or earlier. Please add your comments below if you disagree.