Where Did Tomcat Come From?
The first Java servlet container was Sun Microsystems's Java Web Server (JWS). Sun's Java Web Server was a product that Sun offered for sale. It was more affordable than most commercial server offerings, but it did not enjoy widespread commercial success—largely due to Java still being new, and servlets being only recently introduced. One of Java Web Server's main outgrowths, however, was the Java Servlet Specification as a de facto standard that Sun documented and made available separately. One big success of JWS was that it put Java servlets in the limelight.
In 1996, a plethora of free Java servlet containers became popular. Apache's JServ and CERN/W3C's Jigsaw were two of the earliest open source Java servlet containers. They were quickly followed by several more, including Jetty (http://jetty.mortbay.org), the Locomotive Application Server (see the web archives at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.locomotive.org), Enhydra (http://www.enhydra.org), and many others. At the same time, commercial servlet containers were starting to become available as the industry embraced the Java Servlet standard; some of these were WebLogic's Tengah, ATG's Dynamo, and LiveSoftware's JRun.
In 1997, Sun released its first version of the Java Servlet Development Kit (JSDK). The JSDK was a very small servlet container that supported JSP and had a built-in HTTP 1.0 web server. In an effort to provide a reference implementation for developing servlets, Sun made it available ...