Preface
Tomcat has eased the lives of thousands of Java™ developers, supplying them with a free environment for testing and deploying web applications. Tomcat has proved its mettle in all kinds of environments, providing the foundation you'll need to apply your Java expertise to the Web.
What's This Book About?
Tomcat is a Java servlet container and web server from the Apache Software Foundation (http://tomcat.apache.org). A web server is, of course, a program that dishes out web pages in response to requests from, for example, a user sitting at a web browser. But web servers aren't limited to serving up static HTML pages; they can also run programs in response to user requests and return the dynamic results to the user's browser. This is an aspect of the Web that Apache's Tomcat is very good at because Tomcat provides both Java servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSPs) technologies (in addition to serving traditional static pages and external CGI programs written in any programming language). The result is that Tomcat is a good choice for use as a web server for many applications, including using it as a high performance production web server. And it's a very good choice if you want a free, open source (http://opensource.org) servlet and JSP engine. It can be used standalone and in conjunction with other web servers such as Apache httpd.
This book is about how to use Tomcat itself. If you're looking for detailed information and tutorials about how to write web applications, be sure to read ...