I have been looking to learn (and work) some open source project .After extensively searching various open source projects online , I set my eye on Apache Tomcat. It is widely popular web server used for J2EE enterprise applications and most importantly it is purely written in java. Another advantage of learning Tomcat is that one can consolidate the Servlet and JSP topics.
So what is a Apache Tomcat ? It is a web server which implements the specification of Servlet and JSP.
How about Tomcat as a servlet container ? A servlet container an environment in which a servlet is born, live and prosper.Whenever there is request for the dynamic resource , Tomcat delegates this request to the servlet container and responsible for generating the response.
A figure below will depicts the basic working of Tomcat
A tomcat provides the administrative support for the servlet and other low level services like session management ,class loading etc.
what is the basic architecture of servlet container or Tomcat ?. It is interesting to note that the Tomcat's architecture follows the construction of a Matryoshka doll from Russia.It is all bout the containment of an entity within another entity.
In Tomcat 'container is a generic term used to refer to any component that can contain another component like Server, Service, Engine, Host or Context.
The Server and Service are
Top level elements as they represents the running instance of Tomcat.The Engine, Host and Context are designated as the
Containers they are responsible for processing the incoming request and generating the response.
Nested components are sub-elements of either top-level elements or Containers such as Valve, Resources, Realm, Loader, Manager etc.
A
Connector is major component of Tomcat architecture. It represents the connection between the client (web browser) and the Tomcat.
So this was the brief introduction to the Apache Tomcat. I'll explore more as i dive into it
note: Apache Tomcat project is developed under the Apache Software Foundation.
