Apache Jakarta and Beyond: A Java Programmer’s Introduction

Chapter 17. Tomcat

So far this book has discussed applications that facilitate the process of development and toolkits that solve common problems encountered during development. Tomcat is neither of these things; rather it is an application into which developers install their code. Tomcat provides a complete environment for this code; it handles all interactions with the outside world and provides services and APIs that abstract these interactions.

Briefly stated, Tomcat is a Web and application server, meaning its principal job is to open one or more sockets, read requests over those sockets, pass the requests to appropriate handlers, and send the responses back to the end user. This description, however, greatly understates what Tomcat does. ...