[Prokaryotic_crap]

Hello,

I'm just starting out with web applications. Can someone please explain to me whay is Apache Tomcat and when is it used/why is it used? I have been searching the net and couldn't seem to find a jargon-free good description/explanation.

Cheers,

[Planto]

It's a web server. It hosts your application and handles incoming HTTP requests. Tomcat is the same as any other web server like Apache or IIS, except it's designed to host web applications written in Java.

[Prokaryotic_crap]

(Original post by Planto)
It's a web server. It hosts your application and handles incoming HTTP requests. Tomcat is the same as any other web server like Apache or IIS, except it's designed to host web applications written in Java.

what do you mean by 'host' and 'handle incoming HTTP requests'?

[j.smith1981]

Handle requests simple means that when you click on an external (to your own local computer) link, a service (what a server consists of) will send you what you want, in the most basic nut shell explanation I can find.

The main reason why Tomcat's used or what it can be capable of, is when you want to build enterprise applications for the web, what I mean by that is, when you're building web apps and it's a massively critical application to your business you are working on, say a sales chat portal on a site that's been written in servlets (what a type of implementation of J2EE is) allows you to then add additional features, whilst the applications running and not having to take your app offline at any point, if you have programmed it efficiently, then when the new feature(s) are ready to be put online or sent up to the server they just add themselves to the already running application.

It's like a truly enterprise operating system like Linux RHEL will try to keep old functions and add new ones, to keep the older users using their operating system, but allowing more features to be added, sometimes though as I have found out that's not always entirely possible in the sense of additional software but in the actual Operating Systems functions for programming like glibc for example there will be the old native functions as well as the newer ones.

That's really one of many of the bigger reasons for using Java Enterprise Edition capable services, like Tomcat is one major player within that need within IT services.

[mfaxford]

(Original post by j.smith1981)
...
The main reason why Tomcat's used or what it can be capable of, is when you want to build enterprise applications for the web, what I mean by that is, when you're building web apps and it's a massively critical application to your business you are working on, say a sales chat portal on a site that's been written in servlets...

Wow, that just seemed to get very confusing - and I know my way around Linux systems and web servers.

(Original post by Prokaryotic_crap)
Hello,

I'm just starting out with web applications. Can someone please explain to me whay is Apache Tomcat and when is it used/why is it used? I have been searching the net and couldn't seem to find a jargon-free good description/explanation.

Cheers,

Tomcat is a piece of software that converts your web application (written in Java) into something that can be used by a web browser over the internet. It's similar in operation as PHP and ASP (which use their own languages). Tomcat is often used in conjunction with Apache (similar to PHP).

Web browsers work by interperating HTML (content) along with CSS (CSS) to display the web page often with Javascript (client side programming). On classic sites these are static pages where the content doesn't change for more modern sites it's desireable for content to be more dynamic (often using a database), this is where JSP/Java, PHP, .NET etc. are used.

[Prokaryotic_crap]

Thanks guys

[ch0llima]

It's worth noting that you can use mod_jk to run Apache and Tomcat side-by-side. Apache can serve the static content and all webapp content requests are handled by Tomcat. A powerful combination.

[estel]

(Original post by ch0llima)
It's worth noting that you can use mod_jk to run Apache and Tomcat side-by-side. Apache can serve the static content and all webapp content requests are handled by Tomcat. A powerful combination.

Isn't it becoming more common to use something like lighttpd instead of Apache if you're just serving static content?

[j.smith1981]

Apologies for bumping this thread but.

Yea lighttpd has great performance, it isn't as heavy bloated as apache is, but for popularity alone apache is the leader (I think always has been).

It's all entirely dependant upon what you feel comfortable using really, or what you've been given. Like all the things IT related.