Alternative Apache/Tomcat combinations

[Ross Nicoll <jr...@dcs.st-and.ac.uk>]

With all this mention of using mod_jk, I thought I'd mention a few other 
methods of combining Apache and Tomcat, that we've had quite a lot of 
success with.

We have two projects running on the same physical machine, INSIDE and MMS. 
INSIDE has static pages that describe the project, and uses JSP. MMS has a 
static front page, and all other pages are generated dynamically.

INSIDE uses mod_jk, that's simple enough. We've had two problems with 
INSIDE however, and different solutions:

First of all, we discovered that one of the people working on MMS was 
behind a firewall that blocked all outgoing packets to 8080. To solve 
this, we used the alternative method of proxying, so that all requests to 
a specific URL under port 80, were passed on to port 8080:

ProxyPass /tags/ http://localhost:8080/tags/
ProxyPassReverse /tags/ http://localhost:8080/tags/


Then it was pointed out that our URL for getting to MMS was slightly long 
(hostname.dept.domain.ac.uk:8180/mms ... you get the idea), so we 
assigned the hostname "mms" to the box, and had Apache redirect requests 
arriving at port 80, with URLs for hostname, to port 8101:

<VirtualHost 138.251.206.181>
        ServerName mms.dcs.st-and.ac.uk
        ServerAlias mms mms.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk mms.dcs.st-and.ac.uk www.mms.dcs.st-and.ac.uk
        Redirect /mms http://mms.dcs.st-and.ac.uk:8180/tags/
        Redirect / http://mms.dcs.st-and.ac.uk:8180/tags/
</VirtualHost>


I'm just wondering if anyone else uses these methods? Is proxying slower 
than using mod_jk, for example? Do people think its better to proxy (and 
therefore do things transparently) or redirect (should be faster)?

People have also mentioned that Apache is more stable and secure. Have 
their actually been any significant security issues with Tomcat (allowing 
JSP source to be seen I don't consider particularly significant, for 
example)?


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