Tomcat 6 Developer's Guide [Paperback]

Damodar Chetty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2009

This book taps into the author's wide experience as an architect and programmer to explore Tomcat from the ground up. Each major component of Tomcat is covered in careful detail, both from a conceptual and an implementation perspective. Written with detailed explanations and lots of screenshots, the book covers its topics in a concise, practical, and understandable manner. This book is intended for web developers who want to take their programming skills to the next level, and for server administrators who want to get a better understanding of the container software they manage. This book will give you an expert's understanding of every component that contributes to the overall request processing capabilities of Tomcat. In addition, the concepts you learn will be general enough to be carried over to other servlet containers. This book is also a good starting point for developers who want to understand how high availability and high performance software, such as Tomcat, are designed. If you wish to contribute to the Tomcat project, then this is an ideal book for you. Prior knowledge of the Java programming language, and web development on the Java platform is assumed.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Damodar Chetty

Damodar Chetty is a lifelong programmer with almost two decades in the computer software industry. He cut his teeth on assembler and BASIC programming, and has journeyed through FORTRAN, COBOL, Visual Basic, C++, and Java. Along the way he has stubbed his toes often enough to develop a keen sense of where dragons lie. He is currently an independent consultant at Software Engineering Solutions, Inc. doing what he loves most - building high quality software.

Damodar has a degree in Electronics & Telecommunications engineering from the University of Bombay, and higher degrees in Management Sciences from the University of Goa, and in Computer Engineering from the University of Minnesota

He currently lives in Woodbury, Minnesota with his wife, Devi, and his children, Ashwin and Anita.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (December 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847197280
• ISBN-13: 978-1847197283
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #419,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great book for devs and sysadmins, February 15, 2010

By 

I. Cherouvim (Athens, Greece) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tomcat 6 Developer's Guide (Paperback)

I've been writing Java webapps and using tomcat on production for the past 5 years.

This book is the best and most complete tomcat analysis book I've read. It is for developers and sysadmins, and it gives both the high level and very detailed views of the system. It starts by taking you through building your own tomcat from source (using ant and eclipse) and extensively explains the servlet spec, JNDI and all parts of the container. It also unravels a very dark corner of java (which directly relates to web containers), the classloader, in a way which does make sense.

The book shows all the configuration details, in a pragmatic way. Some of the options and usage patterns are not that well written on the official tomcat documentation site.

While reading it I improved my tomcat configuration on production by reducing the memory footprint of the container. I also vastly improved my understanding on the servlet spec, web containers and tomcat itself so I had a chance to improve parts of my production code.

The book is very well written and the only disadvantage is that at some parts you feel like the author steps through the code describing it in English. Fortunately these parts are few and short.

All in all, the amount of knowledge this book gives is great and nowhere else to be found is such cohesive way.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great guide to the Tomcat codebase, November 23, 2011

By 

Mike Angstadt - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tomcat 6 Developer's Guide (Paperback)

The book is very wholistic in its approach to educating the reader. It provides a well-written overview of JavaEE and HTTP in Chapter 2. And whenever it mentions a technology that Tomcat uses in some way, it immediately gives a brief overview of that technology. I found this helpful because it gave me the knowledge I needed to continue reading without having to switch to a search engine. For example, in Chapter 5, when discussing the JNDI functionality that Tomcat comes packaged with, the book pauses for a moment to explain the basic concepts of JNDI itself. The book will also often describe the historical origins of the technology, like in Chapter 1, where it discusses the origins of Ant (spoiler alert: it was created as a custom build system for Tomcat).

The instructions for downloading the Tomcat source code and building it are very clear. It provides a specific branch you can checkout from the Tomcat Subversion server, which is the exact version of Tomcat that was used when writing the book. This allows you to follow along without worrying about dealing with differences between what you see in the code and what you see in the book. And it also includes instructions for getting the project properly configured with Eclipse.

The later chapters of the book go into a lot of detail about the various classes that make up the Tomcat source code, so be prepared for some serious code spelunking. Anyone who is interested in doing serious coding in the Tomcat codebase will gain a lot from these chapters.

I'd recommend this book to people who want to work on the Tomcat source code and need something to guide them through it. I'd also recommend the book to JavaEE developers who use Tomcat on a regular basis and who want to expand their knowledge.