Datasheet

Chapter 1

We will cover the following points in this chapter:

❑ The origins of the Tomcat server

❑ The terms of Tomcat's license and how it compares to other open source licenses

❑ How Tomcat fits into the Java big picture

❑ How Tomcat can be integrated with Apache and other web servers

Humble Beginnings: The Apache Project

One of the earliest web servers was developed by Rob McCool at the National Center for

Supercomputer Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, referred to colloquially as the

NCSA project, or NCSA for short. In 1995, the NCSA server was quite popular, but its future was

uncertain as Rob left NCSA in 1994. A group of developers got together and compiled all the NCSA

bug fixes and enhancements they had found and patched them into the NCSA code base. The

developers released this new version in April 1995, and called it Apache, which was a sort of acronym

for "A PAtCHy Web Server".

Apache was readily accepted by the web-serving community from its earliest days, and less than a year

after its release it unseated NCSA to become the most used web server in the world (measured by the

total number of servers running Apache), a distinction that it has held ever since (according to Apache's

web site). Incidentally, during the same period that Apache's use spread, NCSA's popularity plummeted

and by 1999 was officially discontinued by its maintainers.

For more information on the history of Apache and its developers, see

http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html.

Today the Apache web server is available on pretty much any major operating system – as of this

writing, downloads are available for 29 different operating systems. Apache can be found running on

the some of the largest server farms in the world as well as on some of the smallest devices (including

the Linux-based Sharp Zaurus hand-held). In Unix data centers, Apache is as ubiquitous as air

conditioning and UPS systems.

While Apache was originally a somewhat mangy collection of miscellaneous patches, today's versions

are state-of-the-art, incorporating rock-solid stability with bleeding edge features. The only real

competitor to Apache in terms of market share and feature set is Microsoft's Internet Information

Services (IIS), which is bundled free with certain versions of the Windows operating system. At the time

of writing, Apache's market share was estimated at around 56%, with IIS at a distant 32% (statistics

courtesy of http://www.netcraft.com/survey/, June 2002).

It is also worth nothing that Apache has a reputation of being much more secure than Microsoft IIS.

When new vulnerabilities are discovered in either server, the Apache developers fix Apache far faster

than Microsoft fixes IIS.