Chapter 5. Integration with the Apache Web Server

Suppose you already have your main web site up and running with the Apache httpd web server. You want to get started with Tomcat, but you do not switch your entire site over. Or, you want to use Tomcat for servlets and JavaServer pages, but keep running the older server because you believe it will give better performance for static pages, binary images, and the like. There are several ways of integrating Tomcat into another web server, but they fall into a small set of general categories, in the order of increasing quality but also increasing complexity:

• Two separate web servers connected by URLs

• Proxying requests from Tomcat to Apache httpd

• Proxying requests from Apache httpd to Tomcat via mod_proxy

• Other Apache httpd connector modules, including mod_jk