Chapter 12. Tomcat and IIS

The previous chapter discussed how Apache could be used as a front end to Tomcat. This chapter details the use of Internet Information Services (IIS) with Tomcat. IIS is a popular Web server for Web sites hosted on Microsoft platforms and is used for deploying server-side solutions developed in ASP, C#, and other Microsoft technologies. The primary reason for running IIS along with Tomcat is to allow service providers to support heterogeneous server-side solutions (for example, both ASPs and JSPs) on the same platform.

The Tomcat project provides an Internet Services Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) redirector plug-in for connecting IIS and Tomcat. This chapter covers installation and configuration of the ISAPI plug-in to connect Tomcat with IIS, including the following topics:

  • Role of the ISAPI plug-in

  • Configuring Tomcat and IIS to work together

  • Suggested architectures offering greater scalability

  • Troubleshooting tips

The configuration described in this chapter has been tested with IIS 5, which is the version supported for Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000 Server. For deployments on IIS 6 (i.e., on Windows Server 2003) you need to switch IIS to the IIS 5 isolation mode, as described later in the chapter.

Role of the ISAPI Plug-in

The integration of Tomcat with a Web server is accomplished with the help of two components: an IIS Web server–specific component and a Java-based Connector implementation. These two components communicate with each other ...

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