How is apache tomcat used

I'll briefly introduce TomEE later in this article. Being a hoary ancient of the software world, a number of Tomcat versions are available. Information on version differences is available on the Tomcat homepage. You can usually just pick the latest stable version. For our purposes, download the latest version of Tomcat, which currently is Tomcat 9. You have a choice of downloading Tomcat as an archive. The best choice is up to you--unless of course you are not running on Windows, in which case you'll go for the archive.

We'll use the archive for this article. Go to the command-line and type gunzip apache-tomcat This creates the following directories:. If you installed Tomcat as a service, it is already running. Otherwise, go ahead and start it up by entering.

Now, you should be able to browse to Tomcat's welcome screen in a browser. Tomcat's webapps directory is where you deploy an application. You can drop a. The component does also manage applications as well as sessions across the network. It is worth mentioning that there are a whole lot of components which users can either opt to build on their own or download from one of the numerous mirrors and then proceed to upload into the server.

It is also important to note that by adding some administrative services from other vendors, it is possible to meet IT operations requirements; giving users a complete suite of services at any given time. As earlier mentioned, defining whether Apache Tomcat is an application server is dependent on who you are talking to.

Those who develop rather lightweight and not too complex web based applications will vouch for it as an application server since they use it quite effectively and efficiently on a daily basis as an application server. The few add-ons that they need to deploy from time to time notwithstanding. Whichever the case, the truth though is that even though Tomcat cannot be technically defined as an application server, it is continuously and successfully being used as an application server for millions of mission-critical applications on a daily basis.

The jury is still out there. Is Tomcat An Application Server? Table of Contents show. What Is An Application Server? Share this post:. Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on linkedin. Share on reddit. Share on skype. So what makes Tomcat Apache different from other web or application servers, and why should you use it for your Java-based projects?

Read on to find out. But what is a Java Servlet? This is software that enables a web server to handle dynamic Java-based web content using the HTTP protocol. What is Apache Tomcat? Java servlets are small Java programs that define how responses and requests are handled by the server. A developer would write their servlet or JSP and let Tomcat conduct all of the routing and backend work. Now 22 years later Tomcat is a leading top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation, and has been downloaded more than 10 million times.