This book will help you resolve these issues and boost your confidence in handling Apache Tomcat 7 administration using the tips, tricks, and best practices used by various industry experts to maintain their middleware infrastructure. The best thing that the author did while designing the content is a practical solution, with a detailed description of why we are doing this solution.
Apache Tomcat (or Jakarta Tomcat, or simply Tomcat) is an open source servlet container developed by The Apache Software Foundation. The latest major stable release, Apache Tomcat version 7, implements the Servlet 3 and JavaServer Pages 2 specifications from the Java Community Process. It includes many additional features that make it a useful platform for developing and deploying web applications and web services.
Apache Tomcat 7 Essentials follows a practical approach to explain installing, configuring, and maintaining Tomcat. It helps you to understand the middleware architecture to host multiple websites and also provides the confidence to implement middleware support. It imparts to you the capacity to resolve migration issues and also provides regular maintenance solutions. This is the first, and only, book to cover upgrading to Tomcat 7 from the previous versions.
The journey of the reader starts at the beginner's level and ends at the expert level. The content is designed in such a way that it balances the theory and practical approach for understanding concepts related to handling middleware and web issues.
In this book, you will go through a three-phase life cycle. The first cycle consists of the installation, configuration of Tomcat 7 on different OSes, other configurations related to the JDBC, port, deployment, and so on.
The second phase deals with the building of an enterprise application setup and high availability architectures (clustering and load balancing). The third and critical phase will teach you to handle critical issues, performance tuning, and the best practices for various environments such as Dev/QA/Stage/Production.
This book gives you a wider vision of using Tomcat 7 in web technologies and the skill to optimize its performance using Apache Tomcat 7.
Chapter 1, Installation of Tomcat, covers the Apache Tomcat history and the new features introduced in Tomcat 7. The step-by-step installation of Tomcat 7 on Windows and Linux operating systems and common problems that may arise during the installation and their possible solutions are also discussed.
Chapter 2, Configuration and Deployment, covers the configuration of Tomcat including the DataSource configuration for different databases such as Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and Context Path creation using an application. Various ways to perform deployment including deployment using Tomcat Manager for a sample application and troubleshooting common issues are also discussed.
Chapter 3, Performance Tuning, explains the different ways of performance improvement and techniques in Apache Tomcat 7. Step-by-step configurations for Connectors, JVM performance tuning, and OS parameter optimization are also covered.
Chapter 4, Integration of Tomcat with the Apache Web Server, explains the integration of Apache/IIS with Tomcat 7, integration of various components such as mod_jk, mod_proxy, and real-time issues which may arise during integration, along with their solutions.
Chapter 5, Securing Tomcat 7, explains the various policies of Tomcat 7 and its functionalities such as the Catalina policy and System level policy. Measures to enable security and their benefits such as SSL, best practices used in real-time industries to secure Tomcat 7 in the production environment, by doing the configuration change and SSL implementation are also covered.
Chapter 6, Logging in Tomcat 7, explains the different methods of enabling logs in Tomcat 7—log4j and JULI. Also, the best practices used for log analysis, tips, and tricks are discussed.
Chapter 7, Troubleshooting in Tomcat, covers different issues faced by the application/web administrators in a real-time environment, how to avoid these issues in the production environment using different techniques with errors and their solutions, thread dump analysis and tools used for thread dump analysis, memory issues, steps for troubleshooting real-time problems, and web server benchmarking.
Chapter 8, Monitoring and Management of Tomcat 7, explains various processes of monitoring in Tomcat 7, components using Tomcat Manager and JConsole, such as different ways of monitoring, how monitoring is done in Tomcat 7, JConsole, and how it is used.
Chapter 9, Clustering in Tomcat 7, explains clustering of Tomcat 7 and its implementation technique. Topics included are clustering architecture, horizontal and vertical clusters and their benefits, implementation of horizontal and vertical clustering on Tomcat 7, and verification of clusters.
Chapter 10, Tomcat Upgrade, explains various strategies used in the upgrade from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and the various steps followed during the upgrade process such as the life cycle of the upgrade, upgrade configuration of Tomcat 7, DataSource configuration, and discussions on various ITIL processes used during upgrade.
Chapter 11, Advanced Configuration for Apache Tomcat 7, explains the advanced configuration of Tomcat 7 and its optimization parameters. Key points covered in the environment are virtual hosting, features of Development/QA/Stage/Production, Tomcat as a service, and running Tomcat as a non privileged user.
To understand the contents of this book, you should have a basic knowledge of Windows or Linux operating systems and it is an added advantage if you have some knowledge in Java.
If you are a J2EE Administrator, Migration Administrator, Technical Architect, or Project Manager for a web hosting domain, and are interested in Apache Tomcat 7, then this book is for you. If you are responsible for the installation, configuration, and management of Tomcat 7, then this book will be of help to you too.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Due to Tomcat 7's support for web fragments, developers now don't need to implement the specific library configurations for their application web.xml."
A block of code is set as follows:
# .bash_profile # Get the aliases and functions if [ -f ~/.bashrc ];then . ~/.bashrc fi # User specific environment and start-up programs JAVA_HOME=/opt/jdk1.6.0_24 PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH:$HOME/bin export PATH JAVA_HOME unset USERNAME
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<Executor name="tomcatThreadPool
"namePrefix="catalina-exec-"
maxThreads="150"
minSpareThreads="4"/>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
[root@localhost opt]# cksum apache-tomcat-7.0.12.zip
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The previous screenshot shows the packages which are available in md5, and by clicking on md5 on the website, we can compare the checksum generated in our system with the value given on the site."
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