Sporadic (spastic?) update number three: Tomcat

[tcepsa]

I'll open by saying that I <3 the HeadFirst series of books. The books are designed to teach computer stuff, mainly Java and Internet-based technologies (HTML, CSS, etc.) and they use techniques that I'm very fond of. It's kind of like the For Dummies... books, only better. Same kind of writing style--informal, informative, irreverant, fun, and funny--but with more focus on additional things that help you learn. Like pictures (the Java ones tend to have fifties-style pictures with captions along the lines of, "Wouldn't it be neat if there were already code written that would do this for me, and all I would have to do would be to tell the JVM that I wanted to include it? That would be just dreamy. But I'm sure nothing like that could possibly exist...") and text scribbled on the diagrams like actual notes, instead of crammed down in the caption where it's harder to tell what it relates to, and tons of different exercises, and I'm getting way off the point of this post.

I've been using Tomcat as a part of my job for over six months now, and I still don't really understand what it does. So I decided that's not a good thing, and I picked up the "Servlets and JSP" book to get a better idea of what is going on behind the scenes with all these JSP things (I can write wickedly clever code, but I want to have a better idea of the universe that my code is just one small part of. Plus I might go ahead and see whether I can get certified as a Sun Certified Web Component Developer--never hurts to be able to add something like that to the resume ^_^)

So I've installed the latest version of Tomcat on my personal box here at home. Unfortunately it was under the Windows side--Ubuntu, the Linux distribution that I am currently using--seems to be missing a lot of the development suite necessary to actually compile programs, so I haven't quite got it up and running over here yet. But before Windows crashed I was able to get it up and serving up a small JSP--nothing dynamic, but the fact that I was able to make text of my own choosing appear in something more complex (and powerful) than HTML is a very exciting prospect for me ^_^ So, all in all, I'm pretty pumped about this whole learning-more-about-servlets thing, especially since--like C/C++--I can develop and practice right on my own machine for free. :-D

Comments

[xilet.livejournal.com]

Install it on the *nix box as a binary package, honestly even for someone who is as much of a fanatic of from-source-control-freak as myself, I still do it. The ant compiler that they use tends to be more trouble then it is worth. The trick is just install it all in /usr/local/jakarta-xxxx, ln it to /usr/local/tomcat, create a user:group tomcat:tomcat and give it ownership of that directory [also set his home directory to /usr/local/tomcat].
Then to start it all you need to do is set the JAVA_HOME path to a current jdk, and run bin/start_tomcat.sh [as tomcat]. You can of course do this as root insted, just privlidge seperation is always a good idea.
You do know what Tomcat does now right? I still have co-workers that even though they have used it for well over a year with several of the products we do training on, still have no idea what exactly it does, or how it compares to apache or iplanet.

[fortryll.livejournal.com]

~blink~

~blink~

Oooh. Shiny! ~runs away~

[tcepsa.livejournal.com]

*grin* I'll have to come back later when I'm at home and can actually give this a try, but I think that makes sense to me ^_^

As far as what Tomcat does, to give a cop-out answer, it's a container. To give a better answer, it's my understand that it interfaces with Apache (or other webserver application) and runs servlets (on behalf of the webserver) which generate webpages on the fly as they are requested and then pass the pages back to the webserver to return to the client. Though it can apparently also act as a standalone webserver, since it was serving pages on Windows for me even though I didn't have Apache or IIS or anything like that configured. So I'm still working on understanding on why you need Apache if you have Tomcat, and some of the other, finer points, but cut me some slack; I only just got the book yesterday ;)

[princesskaite.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info...I should get myself a book.

My current understanding of Tomcat is I have to clean out my work folder when stuff doesn't run :)
hehe
Actually I know a little more than that - but I'm just starting to figure out how all our pieces fit together.

Are you sure you don't want a new job??? :)