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Installing and Running Tomcat 5.5
The examples for the Ajax chapter of jQuery in Action require the services of server-side resources in
order to operate. In order to address the needs of a variety of readers, the back-end code has been
provided in PHP and in JSP format. If you wish to use the JSP examples, it is necessary to set up an
application server that is Servlets 2.4 and JSP 2.0 capable.
But not to fear! Not only has the downloaded example code for that chapter already been set up so
that it is a ready-to-go web application (there’s no need for you to build anything), the free and easily-
obtained Tomcat 5.5 web server is a snap to set up. No knowledge of Java on your part is required to do
so. This document will walk you through obtaining and setting up your Tomcat server.
This, of course, assumes that you have Java itself installed upon your system. If not, please visit the
Sun site for details on installing Java 1.5 for your operating system. (This is also a not-too-arduous task).
Obtaining and Unpacking the Distribution
You can download the latest version of Tomcat 5.5 from the Apache Tomcat site at:
http://tomcat.apache.org/download-55.cgi
At the time that this document was written, version 5.5.23 was the latest stable build. You should
probably download the most recent stable version if 5.5.23 has been superceded.
For Windows you’ll want to grab the Core .zip file (avoid the Windows Service Installer – it does a
much deeper installation than is needed for simply running the examples). For OS X and other UNIX
systems, download the Core .tar.gz file. See figure 1:
Figure 1: Dowloading the core Tomcat 5.5 distribution
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Installing and Running Tomcat 5.5
