Manni Wood wrote:
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.
The documentation is bad, we all agree on this and when I take a look at any Apache module the doc is way better. But the lack of documentation is also due to the complexity put in jk/jk2 after years of features additions without re-factory. Also jk and jk2 inherited this, was designed to work with Apache 1.3, 2.0, IIS, iPlanet it supports also Domino and this cross compat stuff made it a very different Apache module.
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.)
Well documentation and good default are also requested by tomcat-dev main commiters.
It's now time to refactor and redesign it with Apache 2.x (APR/AP) in mind to follow Apache 2.x admins habbits and try to make something simpler.
We came on httpd-dev for advice from experts, and may be an extended mod_proxy could be the solution. But we also want to keep the AJP/1.3 and AJP/1.4 protocols since it works well and so a pure HTTP proxy is only part of the game.
- Could mod_proxy be open to support AJP/1.x as tomcat connections ?
- Should we learn from mod_proxy to redesign something using AJP ?
Many questions which need experts answers...