Tomcat: The Definitive Guide (Paperback)

by Jason Brittain (Author), Ian F. Darwin (Author)
Key Phrases: server software instances, distributed servlet container, bad user input, Started Automatic, Attribute Meaning, Getting Started (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Tomcat: The Definitive Guide offers something for everyone who uses Tomcat. System and network administrators will find detailed instructions on installation, configuration, and maintenance. For users, it supplies insightful information on how to deploy Tomcat. And seasoned enterprise Java developers will have a complete reference to setting up, running, and using this powerful software. Tomcat: The Definitive Guide covers all major platforms, including Windows, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X, contains details on Tomcat configuration files, and has a quick-start guide to get developers up and running with Java servlets and JavaServer Pages. If you've struggled with this powerful yet demanding technology in the past, this book will provide the answers you need.

About the Author
Jason Brittain is a Senior Software Engineer at CollabNet Inc., where he works on collaborative software-project-hosting-infrastructure software made up of more than 50 open source software package codebases. Jason's specialties include dynamic web development, Java application servers, high availability and fault tolerance, clustering, and Jakarta Ant build systems. He has contributed to many Apache Jakarta projects and has been an active open source software developer for several years.

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 1st edition (June 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003188
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003180
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #305,955 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most concise Tomcat book yet, July 7, 2003

By	Kip Perkins (Mt Juliet, TN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just got this book saturday (it's now monday) and this book has already helped me solve two problems and clairify my Tomcat thinking. This book is the best Tomcat book yet for Administrators. I have used the others (Professional Apache-Tomcat, Mastering Tomcat Development, and Apache-Jakarta Tomcat), but this one has been the best. It is very well organized and has some great helps in it. It does not try to cover everything, but it focuses on some. For example, Tomcat 3 is not covered by this book. Mod_webapp is not covered, but mod_jk2 is very well covered. The authors covers how to secure Tomcat through chroot (using a special file they ported from OpenBSD called jbchroot.c), run Tomcat as an unpriviledged user on port 80, Clustering with or without Apache, Apache integration is given REAL coverage. The best thing about this book is the focus on Administration and not development, this is obviously for administrators. The other books were focused on developers and were either way to short or had way too much scattered and confused information. Admins like things well organized and consistant.
If you are a Sys Admin and need a book on Tomcat administration, get this book and forget about the rest.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Great O'Reilly Title, August 2, 2003

By	Timothy E. McGuire "mcgyver5" (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Until I bought this book I had an agreement with Tomcat. Tomcat would serve my servlets like it was supposed to and I wouldn't try to pull any stunts. If I ran into something that wasn't working because of some setting or another in Tomcat, I avoided it. Now that I have this book, the agreement is off. This book is chock full of neat and useful tricks with some excellent examples. The book is very well written in true O'Reilly style (They even found a way to use the word "laconic" which I have never seen used in a computer book before). It illuminated various things I was unaware of, such as:

** How to run the web based Tomcat admin application
** Tomcat restart issues - this was especially interesting and gets to the heart of what java and tomcat really are.
** How to enable Tomcat's SSI servlet so that it will use your existing server-side includes

The book has lots of hints of the "I know how to do this in Apache httpd, but how do I do it in Tomcat?" variety. This is in addition to an entire chapter devoted to connecting Tomcat to Apache httpd.

The subject of a java web server will automatically bleed over into the subjects of Java and Unix and the book does a great job exposing the timid to Unix and Java concepts that help in understanding these technologies. For example, the book gives detailed instructions for setting up a chroot jail on a Unix type system.

I read the chapter on security several times because it is really foundational. It gets at the excellent security abilities of Java and explains them better than I have seen them explained elsewhere. It also gives the basics of possible vulnerabilities of any web application. The stuff in this section applies broadly to any Servlet container, but has a lot of specifics for Tomcat.

Obviously, all of the stuff in the book is available from the Java, Unix, or Tomcat documentation, but the book acts as a guide, pointing out key things in the documentation.

The only limitation of the book that I could tell was that the authors are exclusively from a Unix background. This has the result of making the book slanted towards Linux/Unix. There are a couple of things that the authors show how to do on Unix but leave the impression that there is no way to do it on Windows. For example they say, "Unix type operating systems, run netstat from the command line to see the open ports. You can do this on Windows as well. They also give a Unix shell script that organizes log files so that they look like Apache httpd log files. It would have been nice to offer one for windows as well or at least give a hint for how to do so. A lot of people use Tomcat on windows as a development environment and they should not be ignored.

In summary, the book succeeds in both broad concepts that deal with running any java web server and in exposing the finer details of Tomcat in particular. Another reviewer asked if this was really "Vital Information for Tomcat Programmers and Administrators" as the subtitle says. I would say yes. You get details of programming Tomcat through the configuration files and crucial details for how Tomcat settings affects how your servlets behave. Perhaps they are asking about messing around with the source code of Tomcat? Then no, it is not about programming Tomcat in that sense.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good thorugh reference for all aspects of tomcat admin, November 12, 2004

By	Ben Iglauer (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First note that this book is for tomcat 4, not 5. Hopefully there will soon be an up to date version of this book available.

Note also that this book is from an administrator's perspective, not a developer's. You won't learn how to write custom tag libs from reading this.

Note also that if you are new to tomcat, and just want to get the thing running, there is sufficient on line documentation to do this at the jakarta site. Don't spend money on this book unless you want a solid administration reference.

That being said, it is an great reference to all aspects of tomcat administration. Every element of every configuration file is explained. Also, there is an excellent chapter on tomcat security.