----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 3:29
PM
Subject: Is Apache/Tomcat an alternative
for us?
The mission was to set up a Java-application with
servlets.
The persons to perform this task was two IT-consultants who both
had
previous experience from setting up webservers and web-based
applications.
Apache webserver 1.3.11 was already installed and had been
used for some time to serve static content.
Since Apache webserver do not
have support for servlets we needed to install Tomcat also.
This is how the
work proceeded:
Tomcat 3.2.1 was installed on the
Unix-machine.
According to the Tomcat website this was "the latest release
quality Tomcat build".
Apache webserver was stopped. Then we tried to
start Tomcat. However it refused to start until we
changed the
configuration-script to another port than 8007.
Then we changed the Apache
configuration file to include the Tomcat configuration file.
To connect Apache and Tomcat we needed to
get a webserver-adapter called Jserv. The User guide for Tomcat says
that we need to compile the source-files for Jserv to get a working version
for our OS (Solaris 5).
After an extensive detective work
we found the
needed source-file in the source version of Tomcat. The detective work
took
a very long time, since these files where not in the place indicated by
the
User guide for Tomcat. So we downloaded the source for Tomcat
3.2.1.
We located the source-files for Jserv.
Then we moved to that
directory and ran the commands for compiling. However these commands
didn't
succed, since they called a Perl-script and we didn't have Perl on our
machine.
Since Perl was not included in the Apache server or our version of
Solaris,
we needed to install the Perl parser.
We found Perl 5.005_03 for Solaris on
Netscape's site and installed it.
However the Perl parser didn't accept
the included script from Tomcat for compiling called "apxs"
due to several
errors in it.
So we now have three alternatives.
Alternative 1
Skip Apache web-server and use another one that
can handle Java-servlets better.
If we used a Java-based web-server with
built-in support for servlets we wouldn't need a webserver-adapter
like
Jserv and no seperate servlet-engine like Tomcat.
Alternative 2
Download another version of Tomcat and hope that
the Perl-script apxs and everything else in it
is correct this time.
Alternative 3
Download another version of the Perl-parser and
hope that it accepts the Perl-script apxs.
Does anyone has any opionons on what alternative
we should go for or some other alternative? We also need the webserver to
handle SSL, which means that
we later would have to download and install a
module for that, since our Apache web-server don't support that.
Eyvind Almquist
Tietoenator
Consulting
