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Professional Apache Tomcat
The book covers every aspect of installing and configuring Tomcat in a great deal of depth, detailing its every aspect. From standalone use (where Tomcat is used as a general web server as well as for serving Java content), to integration with the leading web servers Apache (both Unix and Windows versions) and Microsoft's Internet Information Services, nothing appears to have been left out (however, integration with Netscape's Enterprise Server is mentioned in passing early on, but doesn't appear again).
Being only a month old, it's pretty much bang up to date, covering Tomcat 3.x, 4.0.x and 4.1.x with Apache 1.3.x and 2.0.x and IIS 4 and 5.
The book starts with an introduction to the Apache project, and Tomcat's place in the wider scheme of things. The historical progression in serving dynamic web content from CGI to Servlets and JSP is charted, and there's an overview of JSP tags and general web application architecture. This is interesting enough and useful as background, but as this book is intended for administrators, it's covered quickly in the first two chapters, and the main business of installing Tomcat gets underway in chapter 3.
Installation is discussed with both Windows and Linux users in mind, from both binary and source distributions. As the Tomcat source is usually built with Ant, build and installation of this tool is also discussed (Ant and Log4j, both also part of Jakarta, get chapters of their own later in the book). From there, basic configuration of the standalone server followed by detailed examinations of the components that make up Tomcat's architecture fills the next 200 or so pages.
Serious users of Tomcat will wish to employ Tomcat with an existing web server, and four chapters concentrate on this job. There is more emphasis on Apache than IIS, though given Apache's dominance of the web server field, this is understandable. There is inevitably a certain amount of detail aimed at Apache and IIS configuration, and a basic knowledge of both is assumed throughout. However, any necessary information is included in detail; for example the (Apache) connector modules mod_webapp and mod_jk/jk2 are given a thorough treatment, describing their use from source installation to configuration, together with the pros and cons of the various connectors available. Beyond that, we learn how to design larger-scale setups, with an explanation of load balancing techniques and scaling of the system, and performance testing with JMeter, yet another Jakarta project component.
As ever, security is a major concern and gets a lot of emphasis. Before client authentication and the use of SSL are discussed, there's an overview of basic system security with Unix and Windows. This should be teaching granny to suck eggs for a book aimed at administrators, but it's only a few pages and completes the subject. More interesting are the sections on security realms and user/client authentication. We are presented with examples of authenticating against a MySQL database with JDBC (database connectivity with JDBC is a big enough subject in its own right, and so gets a separate chapter too), and digest authentication. We then move on to encryption with SSL: using Tomcat itself with the JSSE and PureTLS Java SSL implementations, then later with Apache and SSL (setting up mod_ssl with Apache gets a very useful appendix of its own, taken from Professional Apache 2.0, another Wrox book). Again, there's lots of detail, right down to how to get hold of signed certificates for your server. Here the book's general emphasis on Apache over IIS is most apparent, as SSL with IIS is not discussed at all. However, I have no experience with IIS, so I can't say for sure how serious this omission might be.
There's a very brief appendix on setting up Apache's Axis SOAP toolkit, but without any mention of SOAP appearing elsewhere in the book. As other concepts are introduced so well, it's a curious addition.
With nine co-authors (though only four got onto the cover photograph - I wonder if they drew straws?), one might expect wildly different styles throughout the book, but each chapter is consistently and clearly laid out with diagrams and relevant configuration file fragments where necessary. There's little levity and it's all written in a very business-like manner, but then this is hardly a subject you'd choose for holiday reading.
Professional Apache Tomcat is surely the definitive book on the subject. I recently used it to integrate Tomcat 4 with an existing Apache 2 installation, and everything went very smoothly. More than just a set of tutorials, it offers a thorough description of the whole architecture, and makes an excellent companion to either of Wrox's Professional Apache books.
There's no CD with the book, but Wrox's website provides some support code, and there are lively forums for readers at p2p.wrox.com.
You can purchase Professional Apache Tomcat from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Having used Tomcat quite a bit, some things aren't as easy as they should be. Doing a simple stand alone installation takes only a few minutes on a clean system, but frequently the system has weird configurations. There are certain things Tomcat documentation could use improvement, so the book is a nice addition. Often I find documentation is written for those with experience and isn't written in plain english for newbies. Looking at the number of posts on tomcat-user mailing list, more than half the questions are due to user error and documentation. More documentation is always a good thing. well most of the time.
We are building our application in Java with Netbeans and deploying our apps in Tomcat and Linux. Our dev cost is very low or is 10% to .Net workshop. Our site is internal and it has very few issues and the apps are very stable and can take a lot of beating. We are looking at TogetherJ for our IDE to do some modelling for our future projects
I think Java and Linux is the future
We see that more and more
Picked up that one yesterday. I bought it cause Rick Hightower (Java Tools for Extreme Programming) wrote the chapter on struts and ant/xdoclet. I haven't been able to go through the whole thing yet, but I need good reference info and insight into how the new Jasper2 engine handles caching of tag libs and some of the quirks that come up in JSP/Servlet development WRT insuring clean separation of data in the various scopes. I'm also very interested in seeing how struts and the JSTL should behave in the container.
I don't think this info is very well covered in the Tomcat docs, dealing with Tomcat development is not the same as the '.htaccess' file as one poster suggested. If your trying to work out why the other guy's JSP/custom taglib stuff isn't as portable as it should be between containers, you really need this type of info.
I'm dissapointed the reviewer sort of glossed over this book, he mentioned the architectural info in the last paragraph, and highlighted all the crap that's already talked about in the Tomcat docs.
I already read most of the open source J2EE/dev mailing lists and visit numerous authors blogs. Trying to tie all this stuff together, while figuring out where it's all headed and discerning the best practices is a bit of a daunting task. The differences between the Jasper and Jasper2 engines is a lot of info, combine with the state of Jakarta-Commons, the rise of Jelly and Maven, and AOP + XRAI coming down the pipe in XDoclet2 and you've got a lot of material to pour through that isn't well documented yet. (ok that's a little out of scope for these 2 books)
I need good books that really help me to formulate development methodologies that scale up and promote efficiency when doing full J2EE app development.
So does anyone have any reading recommendations that will help sort all this out? Should I get this book too, or stick with Mastering Tomcat Development?
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Now, aside from the irony of the slashdot review pimping the book for barnes & noble, under the Amazon.com terms of service, all reviews become exclusive property of Amazon.com.
Like it or not, this is just as serious of a licensing breach as if Microsoft Word included emacs code.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
A while back, I wrote and published a straightforward how-to for integrating Jakarta into Apache (getting Jakarta to share port 80 with Apache as opposed to using 8080).
h tml
So... if anyone is interested:
http://wass.homelinux.net/howtos/Jakarta_How-To.s
>> I am a professor at a large technical college....
Hello, mr. anonymous coward. I certainly hope that you are actually John Carnell, as your comment is cut&pasted from his Oct 31 review of this book on Amazon.com. If not, this message is a copyright violation.
The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life