Professional Apache Tomcat 6

Chapter 6. Advanced Tomcat Features

Earlier chapters discussed Tomcat 6 administration basics and Tomcat system architecture. This chapter explores a collection of administrative tasks that involve advanced features built into standard Tomcat 6. As a Tomcat 6 administrator, you are likely to encounter requests for many of these features from the development team.

More specifically, the following advanced administration tasks are explored:

• Administering access logs

• Working with single sign-on across Web applications

• Request filtering

• Installing a Persistent Session Manager

• Setting up Tomcat JNDI emulation resources to provide developers access to external JDBC and JNDI resources

• Setting up Tomcat for access to a JavaMail session

• Configuring lifecycle listeners

Note that configuration of Realms, a very important advanced Tomcat 6 administration topic, is discussed in Chapter 14. A basic understanding of Tomcat 6's security infrastructure is a prerequisite for appreciating the configuration options in Realms configuration.

This chapter serves as a "cookbook" for these specific tasks. For each task, we provide reasons why a user or a developer may need the feature, followed by the configuration and administrative details. Finally, we present a practical sample configuration, which you can experiment with. Useful hints, tips, or problems that may apply are pointed out along the way.

Valves — Interception Tomcat-Style

Valves are intrinsic architectural elements, similar to filters and specific to ...