JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Installing the Tomcat Server

Tomcat supports many features and configuration options. In this section, I only describe the basics that you must know to get Tomcat up and running. If you plan to use Tomcat extensively for development or as a production server, refer to Tomcat: The Definitive Guide by Jason Brittain and Ian Darwin (O’Reilly).

You can download the Tomcat server in binary format or as source code that you compile yourself. If you’re primarily interested in learning about JSP, I recommend that you use the binary download for running the examples in this book and to develop your own applications. If you’re a Java programmer and are interested in seeing how Tomcat is implemented, feel free to download the source as well and take a look at the internals.

The binary distribution is available at http://jakarta.apache.org/site/binindex.cgi.

On this page you find three types of builds: release builds, milestone builds, and nightly builds. Release builds are stable releases that have been tested extensively and verified to comply with the servlet and JSP specifications. Milestone builds are created as intermediary steps towards a release build. They often contain new features that aren’t yet fully tested but are generally known to work. A nightly build, however, may be very unstable. It’s actually a snapshot of the latest source code and may have been tested only by the person who made the latest change. You should use a nightly build only if you’re involved in the development of Tomcat.

I recommend that you download the latest release build. All examples in this book were developed and tested using the 5.0.12 version, but any release later than 5.0.12 should work fine as well. When you click on the link for the latest release build and select the bin directory, you see a list of archive files in different formats, similar to Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1. Release build packages

How to continue from here varies a bit depending on your platform.