Introduction
Overview
Welcome to
How Tomcat Works
. This book dissects Tomcat 4.1.12 and 5.0.18 and
explains the internal workings of its free, open source, and most popular servlet
container code-named Catalina. Tomcat is a complex system, consisting of many
different components. Those who want to learn how Tomcat works often do know
where to start. What this book does is provide the big picture and then build a
simpler version of each component to make understanding that component easier.
Only after that will the real component be explained.
You should start by reading this Introduction as it explains the structure of the book
and gives you the brief outline of the applications built. The section "Preparing the
Prerequisite Software" gives you instructions on what software you need to download,
how to make a directory structure for your code, etc.
Who This Book Is for
This book is for anyone working with the Java technology.
This book is for you if you are a servlet/JSP programmer or a Tomcat user
and you are interested in knowing how a servlet container works.
It is for you if you want to join the Tomcat development team because you
need to first learn how the existing code works.
If you have never been involved in web development but you have interest in
software development in general, then you can learn from this book how a
large application such as Tomcat was designed and developed.
If you need to configure and customize Tomcat, you should read this book.
To understand the discussion in this book, you need to understand object-oriented
programming in Java as well as servlet programming. If you are not familiar with the
latter, there are a plethora of books on sendets, including Budi's
Java for the Web
with Servlets, JSP, and EJB
. To make the material easier to understand, each
chapter starts with background information that will be required to understand the
topic in discussion.
How A Servlet Container Works
A servlet container is a complex system. However, basically there are three things
that a servlet container does to service a request for a servlet:
