I recently became a hosted member and began studying deployment. Since Astahost uses Apache, I read some documents regarding this server technology. I am certain that this post is novice-level information and simply chronicles my own personal "learning trail."

I have always found Wikipedia to be a good knowledge-base regarding Java-related documentation. Thus, I did a search for Apache via http://en.wikipedia.org and came across Tomcat.

I was already aware of Java Application Server but did not know much about how to deploy Java code from Apache servers. This is where Tomcat comes in.

Tomcat is an Apache technology for deploying Java code. First, my thought was, "alright, simply deploy a *.jar file from Tomcat. Well, I began reading about .war files, or "web archive" files, very similar to a Java Archive File. When the Java code is encompassed within a .war file, it can then be deployed via Tomcat.

I will be reading and posting more on my little learning trail and appreciate any corrections and feedback.

Thanks,
Demirelli

Jackarta-Tomcat is a very good starting point for studying Web development; the distributiveis is free and quite small +
there are couple of sample applications ("jsp-examples etc.), that can be simply copied, renamed and used as templates for you new Web application.
On another hand,
Tomcat Web Server re-starts very quickly, that's why it is a very effective for different testing purposes:
I often use Tomcat for debugging and testing frontend-parts of big commercial applications:
The simplient structure:
HTML/Javascript on client side <- JSP/Servlets on frontend <- MySQL as datastorage.

Having this structure and using Tomcat/MySQL, I can create and test any basic conception of new big application, that will be developed later for other Web servers (like WebLogic etc.)

This post has been edited by java-area: Apr 19 2008, 05:44 PM