Tomcat's relationship with Web server, application server

The Tomcat server is a free open source Web application server. Because Tomcat advanced technology, stable performance and free, so deeply loved by the Java enthusiasts and has been recognized by some software developers, as the current more popular Web application server.

One, Tomcat and application server

To date, Tomcat has been considered the executor of the Servlet/jsp API, also known as the servlet container. However, Tomcat is not only this, it also provides the implementation mechanism of the JNDI and JMX APIs. However, Tomcat is still not an application server, because it does not provide support for most Java EE APIs.

Interestingly, many application servers currently use Tomcat as a container for their servlet and JSP APIs. Because Tomcat allows developers to embed tomcat in their applications by simply adding a single line of thanks. Unfortunately, many business application servers do not comply with this rule.

For developers, choosing Tomcat is an excellent solution if it is to look for the use of servlet, JSP, Jndi, and JMX Technologies to build Java Web applications, but in order to find support for other EE APIs, It would be a good solution to look for an application server or to help Tomcat as an application server; The third way is to find a standalone Java API implementation and then use it in conjunction with Tomcat. While consolidation poses related problems, this approach is most effective.

Two, Tomcat and Web server

Tomcat provides a container that supports servlet and JSP operations. Servlet and JSP can generate dynamic Web content based on real-time needs. For Web servers, Apache only supports static Web pages, and can be powerless to support dynamic Web pages, while Tomcat can provide support for dynamic Web pages as well as static Web pages. Although it is not as fast as the usual Web server or as rich as a Web server, Tomcat is gradually expanding to support static content. Most Web servers are written in the underlying language such as C, taking advantage of the characteristics of the platform, so Tomcat execution speed in pure Java cannot be compared to them.

In general, a large site is the combination of Tomcat and Apache, Apache is responsible for accepting all HTTP requests from the client, and then Servlets and JSP requests to Tomcat for processing. When Tomcat finishes processing, the response is returned to Apache, and Apache returns the response to the client.