I very rarely post to this list, but I've been building web sites for over eight years, and want to chime in.
In my experience building web sites for Fortune 500 companies (some of them Fortune 50 companies), the "get Apache to serve static content while Tomcat only takes care of servlets and JSPs" feature is a *huge* draw. But do you know what the biggest draws of all would be to any Apache 2 module that connects to tomcat? 1. Fantastic documentation. I cannot stress this enough. Hell, I'd even volunteer for this part. The module iteself could be poorly implemented, problematic to compile, and have truly silly defaults, but if it was incredibly well and clearly documented, I'd use it over mod_jk2 starting tomorrow. 2. Barring my comments in 1, a module that really and truly works, and has useful out-of-the-box (or freshly-compiled) defaults. (Maybe even, by defalt, *only* passes servelt/JSP requests to tomcat, and lets Apache handle the rest automatically.) -Manni -----Original Message----- From: Graham Leggett [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 10:12 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Tomcat Developers List Subject: Re: Invitation to HTTPD commiters in tomcat-dev Henri Gomez wrote: > And what about using AJP/1.3 instead of HTTP for connection to tomcat ?) In all my deployments of tomcat I have never seen the point of a custom protocol that did exactly what HTTP does, so all my tomcat deployments are all HTTP, with a simple mod_proxy frontend. Even the "get Apache to server static content" feature wasn't enough of a drawcard, as proper HTTP cache handling and a suitable cache solved this problem. It was far more important for me to arrange the web application as a self contained unit - I would rather be more tidy with an install at the expense of a slightly higher load, than sacrifice a clean install to save some cycles. > - If you add load-balancing/fault-tolerance and AJP 1.3 support in > mod_proxy you'll have about 99% of the current functionalities of > jk 1.2.x. > > We discussed also the need for some dynamic mapping and topology > discovery/update (between Apache and Tomcats Clusters). Proxy has a placeholder in it that says "put the code to make decision about load balancing etc here" - all that is needed is a hook and a module "proxy_loadbalancing.c" to make it happen. > And in fine, we like to have some JMX like functionnalities in Apache 2, > in our case CMX for C Management Extension, a way to update Apache 2.x > configuration while the server is running... This is possibly a whole separate project in itself. I have been meaning to work on a get-apache-config-out-of-ldap extension for a while, what it really should be is "get apache config out of wherever", but this should be an Apache wide thing, not limited to a single module or technology. Regards, Graham --
