Why put Apache httpd in front of Apache Tomcat
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-03-12 10:46:56 - Graham Ellis
Does it seem odd to you that Apache Tomcat is a web server ... and yet the majority of sites run with another web server - Apache httpd - in front of it. Why do they do it?There's a whole host of reasons! They including better logging, load balancing, security, speed of serving static pages such as images, allowing other (non-Java) content to work efficiently on the same domain, more configuration flexibility and so on. I sometimes describe Tomcat as being like an aircraft that will get you from "a" to "b" .... but very few people actually want to go from "a" to "b" - they want to go from somewhere 20 miles from "a" to somewhere 40 miles from "b", so the need something else to complete the journey - a car, or httpd.
So we offer two web server courses - there's a course that covers Apache httpd alone - the majority of non-Java sites run with that server, and a course that covers Apache Tomcat, and also some Apache httpd and how the two interface - which suits that majority of Apache Tomcat users. Both courses are two days in duration - the 'pure httpd' one covering Apache httpd in a lot more detail that the combined course, where httpd is more likely to be used as a wrapper rather than a significantly configured workhorse.
Illustration - preparing the training room (at a customer site somewhere in England!) for a Linux based web server deployment course