Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Acknowledgments

Thanks to James Duncan Davidson and Sun Microsystems for giving us Tomcat in the first place. James worked above and beyond the call of duty to write it and to work out the details of how it could become open source software. Sun Microsystems supported his pioneering work and has strongly supported the evolution of Tomcat since its donation to the Apache Software Foundation.

A colossal thanks goes to Simon St.Laurent, editor of this Second Edition after Brett McLaughlin, for being patient with me beyond my expectations while I spent the necessary time digging deep to uncover and clearly document the answers throughout the book, and for showing continued confidence.

Another big thanks goes to Brett McLaughlin, who edited the First Edition and was the editor of this Second Edition in the early months of the project. Brett made innumerable minor suggestions to improve the book and several times talked us into reorganizing scattered material into the (hopefully) comprehensible form you see before you. Thanks Brett!

Paula Ferguson saw the First Edition of the book through the early stages, and then passed the torch to Brett McLaughlin. Thanks Paula!

Open source projects are just not the same without a vibrant community surrounding them, and we believe that Tomcat could not have gone so far so fast without the stewardship of the Apache Software Foundation and its members. Thanks, ASF, for your hard work, servers, and bandwidth.

Jason Hunter, author of O'Reilly's Java Servlet Programming, provided a very careful reading of the drafts of the First Edition, and suggested many, many improvements. Special thanks to you, Jason.

Jason Brittain's Acknowledgments

A big thanks to my wife Carmina, for taking care of the little ones while I wrote, over the course of more than two years. Thanks, Cutie, for all the help you gave me while I wrote this edition of the book, and for being inspirational to me, and now to our children. I love you very much, and I always will!

Thanks to James Duncan Davidson and Jason Hunter who together had a strong vision of excellence for the First Edition of this book and worked hard to make that vision a reality.

I'd like to personally thank Simon St.Laurent for the help and support for this book. The level of detail and clarity demonstrates how much Simon worked to make sure I had the time to write it that way. Thanks Simon!

Thanks also go to Ian Darwin for coauthoring the first edition of the book. He wrote a large amount of helpful and virtually timeless Tomcat content that remains in this Second Edition.

The person who directly contributed the most content for the Second Edition of this book (besides Simon St.Laurent, the editor through most of the project), was Akbar Ansari. He provided many screen shots that would have taken me countless additional hours to create, he graphed benchmark data numerous times, proofread some of my text and gave me feedback, and most importantly gave me words of encouragement as I wrote. Thanks, Akbar, for being so helpful and genuinely interested!

Thanks also to Jamie Madden for being the tech reviewer for the Second Edition.

Bart Busschots and Jamie Madden both wrote the Mac OS X specific sections of this book—excellent pioneering work guys! Thanks!

Also Sebastien Diotte implemented the initial 5.5+ port of BadInputValve, Sean McCauliff gave feedback about textual strangeness in some chapters, and Mike Miller showed me an important FreeBSD ipfilter port remapping rule. Thanks to Mark Petrovic for conversing with me about the SecurityManager and for writing the security policy autodiscovery article; Nicholas Schuetz for creating and maintaining the #tomcat IRC channel on the irc.freenode.net server (it has helped countless Tomcat users); Philip Morton, Robert Brindamour, and Tom Duggin for fixing a scalability bug in BadInputValve; William Osmond (I forgot to write in my notes what you helped with, but I know you helped! Thanks!); Fabrice Bellard and others for writing QEMU so that I could run so many different operating systems to write about them; and Jason Gabler for showing me sventon.

Thanks to my former co-workers and friends at NASA's Ames research center, and the NASA Kepler Space Telescope mission (http://kepler.nasa.gov) for allowing me to participate. Eventually, our software will find many new habitable worlds, never before detected by mankind.

I want to also thank Rodney Joffe formerly of Genuity for having lots of confidence in me early on in my career, and for introducing me to the subjects of high availability, load balancing, and fault tolerance back in 1996. Also, to David Jemmett, formerly of GoodNet, for not only giving me my first big break as a software engineer and system administrator, but also for giving me a starting point into dynamic web content development in mid-1995. I'm grateful to each of you!

I would like to acknowledge my sisters, Brenda Loukas and Beckey Brittain, who each personally tested quite a bit of the first software I wrote, in the early 1980s. Thanks! Warm wishes also go out to my nephew Nick Dekofski, my nieces Elizabeth Loukas and Jessica Loukas, and my brother-in-law David Loukas.

I also wish to acknowledge and thank Theron Tison, who is the most thoughtful, unselfish, caring person I had the pleasure of being around while growing up. He was the pillar of stability and confidence that allowed me to reach virtually all of my goals. Thank you, Theron, for helping me through so many tough years.

Ian Darwin's Acknowledgments

Mike Loukides encouraged me to find an O'Reilly book to write, when a competing publisher tried to lure me away after the success of Java Cookbook.

Kevin Bedell read the manuscript carefully cover to cover and suggested many improvements (as well as spotting several errors and omissions). Thanks, Kevin.

I have, over the years, learned a lot about JavaServer Pages from Chad Darby, author of Learning Tree's (http://www.learningtree.com) course on servlets and JavaServer Pages. Chad also did a helpful review of the manuscript.

And, of course, to Betty, the woman of my life, and our children Benjamin, Andy, and Margaret. Thanks for your support and for the time away.

My special warm thanks to Jason for taking over and doing all of the revisions for this Second Edition, when I found I had other fish to fry. An extra big "+1" to you, Jason, for sticking with it to completion despite the needs of your growing family!