> As always, I would say start with tomcat by itself. It's the simplest > setup -- don't add Apache until you're sure you need it. Tomcat will > serve your static HTML pages just fine and fast.
It's important to realize that Apache is basically C code rather than Java code, so it tends to run faster and of course is much more mature. Because it's C code, though, it's more likely to have security issues related to buffer overflows or the like. This speed improvement may be even more significant if you're using SSL. Apache also has many other modules that may be useful, including proxy support, URL rewriting and mass virtual hosting. Apache supports lots of different plugin capabilities, so while Tomcat can do static content (HTML, images, javascripts) as well as JSP/servlets, it can't do CGI/Perl/PHP/Python, etc. that might be plugged into an Apache web server. Of course, Apache can't do JSP/servlets or the others directly, only via plugins. To use port 80/443 with Tomcat, you have to launch it from 'root' on Linux/Unix. There may be a way to resolve that nowadays, but the last I heard, that was still the case, and some people use simple firewall/portmapping to push all port 80 traffic to port 8080 (or whatever) that Tomcat is actually listening on. Many people use BOTH for performance reasons as well as security reasons. Apache tends to be fastest for static content and SSL processing, but there's a performance hit when it has to forward the requests through Tomcat for JSP/servlet processing. By putting Apache on the publicly accessible web server and then putting Tomcat on a private network that can be reached by the public web server only, only over the port configured for mod_jk, you can create a very secure Tomcat environment that is much harder to hack into. That's typically a good thing since the Tomcat application uses a database and has all the business logic and JSP web pages that you want to protect the most. Hope this helps... David --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
