JavaServer Faces

Installing the Tomcat Server

Tomcat supports many features and configuration options. In this section, I only describe the basics that you need to know to get Tomcat up and running. If you plan to use Tomcat extensively for development or as a production server, you’ll find extensive information in Jason Brittain and Ian Darwin’s Tomcat: The Definite Guide (O’Reilly).

You can download the Tomcat server in binary format or as source code that you compile yourself. If you’re primarily interested in learning about JSF, I recommend that you use the binary download for running the examples in this book and to develop your own applications. If you’re a Java programmer and are interested in seeing how Tomcat is implemented, feel free to download the source as well and take a look at the internals.

The binary distribution is available at http://jakarta.apache.org/site/binindex.cgi. On this page, you will find three types of builds: release builds, milestone builds, and nightly builds. Release builds are stable releases that have been tested extensively and verified to comply with the supported specifications. Milestone builds are created as intermediary steps towards a release build. They often contain new features that aren’t yet fully tested but are generally known to work. A nightly build, however, may be very unstable. It’s actually a snapshot of the latest source code and may have been tested only by the person who made the latest change. You should use a nightly build only if you’re ...