Re: Perl in Tomcat

[inman]

Tomcat is a Java Application Server not a web server. Tomcat is designed to compile, run and manage Java web applications. The HTTP connector that ships with Tomcat is good enough to get you going (build and test some JSP apps etc.) but is normally replaced by a full web-server build such as Apache.

If you are working with both Java applications and Perl applications then installing and running the Tomcat/Apache combination will give you a better understanding of a building and managing a typical environment.

Of course if Tomcat works out for you then that's OK too!

[exussum0]

Tomcat is a Java Application Server not a web server.

No, tomcat is quite a web server just like apache2 is, and they both support not only HTTP, but other protocols. The differnce is, tomcat by default supports internally java. with mod_perl of course, apache internally supports perl.

[inman]

That depends on your definition of a web server. Tomcat can serve HTML pages and handle CGI but it's capabilities are limited compared to a fully loaded web server such as Apache that was designed to be a web server from the outset.

Tomcat ships with a number of connectors of which one is an HTTP connector. While the Native Tomcat HTTP connector is great, it is limited in functionality compared to a full webserver like Apache. The documentation explains the capabilities and limitations. The documentation also describes why you would choose to implement Tomcat and Apache.

A production Java application environment typically consists of a Java Application Server (e.g. Tomcat) paired with a full web server. This pairing leverages the strengths of both applications.