Introducing Servlet Containers

JSP pages and servlets require a servlet container to operate at all. Tomcat, the subject of this book, is the reference implementation (RI) servlet container, which means that Tomcat’s first priority is to be fully compliant with the Servlet and JSP specifications published by Sun Microsystems. However, this isn’t to say that Tomcat isn’t worthy of use in production systems. Indeed, many commercial installations use Tomcat.

An RI has the added benefit of refining the specification, whatever the technology may be. As developers add code per the specifications, they can uncover problems in implementation requirements and conflicts within the specification.

As noted previously, the RI is completely compliant with the specification and is therefore particularly useful for people who are using advanced features of the specification. The RI is released with the specification, which means that Tomcat is always the first server to provide the new features of the specification when it’s finished.

Looking at Tomcat

Tomcat has its origins in the earliest days of the servlet technology. Sun Microsystems created the first servlet container, the Java Web Server, to demonstrate the technology, but it wasn’t terribly robust. At the same time, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) created JServ, a servlet engine that integrated with the Apache Web server.

In 1999, Sun Microsystems donated the Java Web Server code to the ASF, and the two projects merged to create Tomcat. Version 3.x was the first Tomcat series and was directly descended from the original code that Sun Microsystems provided to the ASF. It’s still available and is the RI of the Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 specifications.

In 2001, the ASF released Tomcat 4.0, which was a complete redesign of the Tomcat architecture and which had a new code base. The Tomcat 4.x series is the RI of the Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specifications.

Tomcat 5.x is the current Tomcat version and is the RI of the Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 specifications. As such, this is the version of Tomcat you’ll use in this book. Note that two branches of Tomcat 5.x exist: Tomcat 5.0.x and Tomcat 5.5.x. Tomcat 5.5.x branched at Tomcat 5.0.27 and is a refactored version that’s intended to work with the proposed Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 (though you can use it with Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4). You should get no discrepancy between the servers when they run Web applications. The main differences are in configuration. Where a configuration discrepancy exists, I’ll give the relevant details.



Pro Jakarta Tomcat 5
Pro Apache Tomcat 5/5.5 (Experts Voice in Java)
ISBN: 1590593316
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 94

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