Chapter 9: Using Tomcats Connectors

Overview

When you use Tomcat out of the box to run Web applications, it’s able to serve HTML pages without any additional configuration. This is because it comes with an HTTP connector that can handle requests from a user’s Web browser. Because of this connector, Tomcat can function as a stand-alone Web server and serve static HTML pages in addition to handling servlets and JSP pages.

Tomcat connectors provide the external interface to Tomcat clients. Two kinds of connectors exist—those that implement an HTTP stack of their own (called HTTP connectors) and those that link Tomcat to an external Web server such as Apache or IIS (called Web server connectors).

In this chapter, you’ll see how to configure both types of Tomcat connectors. As mentioned earlier, you don’t have to do any additional configuration to get the HTTP connector working. So why do you need this chapter? This chapter is useful if you need to modify the HTTP connector configuration (for example, to create a secure HTTPS connection) and if you want to use Tomcat with an external Web server. The reasons for doing so will become clear shortly.

Note that this chapter contains a reference to the HTTPS-related configuration, but the details of SSL setup are in Chapter 12.