Thursday, 13 June 2013

Appache Tomcat

                              http://appachetomcattraining.vibrantgroup.co.in/

Tomcat is primarily an application server, which serves requests to custom-built Java servlets or JSP files on your server. It is usually used in conjunction with the Apache HTTP server (at least in my experience). Use it to manually process incoming requests.
The HTTP server, by itself, is best for serving up static content... html files, images, etc.
Tomcat is an application server from the Apache Software Foundation that executes Java servlets and renders Web pages that include Java Server Page coding. Described as a "reference implementation" of the Java Servlet and the Java Server Page specifications, Tomcat is the result of an open collaboration of developers and is available from the Apache Web site in both binary and source versions. Tomcat can be used as either a standalone product with its own internal Web server or together with other Web servers, including Apache, Netscape Enterprise Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), and Microsoft Personal Web Server. Tomcat requires a Java Runtime Enterprise Environment that conforms to JRE 1.1 or later.
Apache Tomcat is a webcontainer which allows to run servlet and JavaServer Pages based web applications. Most of the modern Java web frameworks are based on servlets and JavaServer Pages and can run on Apache Tomcat, e.g. JavaServer Faces, Struts, Spring.
Apache Tomcat also provides by default a HTTP connector on port 8080, e.g. Tomcat can also be used as HTTP server even though the performance of Tomcat is not as good as the performance of the Apache HTTP server.
The standard deployment format for webapplications is a .war file. If you have create a war application just put this application into the webapps folder. The next time tomcat starts it will unpack the war and make the application available.
Web applications may require external libraries. Typically web application contain there own libraries but if you want to make certain libraries available for all applications you can put them into the folder "lib" and a subfolder below "lib". These libraries are then available for all web applications.
Apache Tomcat server is commonly used for hosting web applications. A web application is one that is executed in a web browser.

For ex: http://www.wikianswers.com/ is a web application that is hosted on a webserver. Tomcat is one of the various web servers available. Some others are weblogic, websphere etc.