Re: ]OT] APR & Tomcat...

[Christopher Schultz <ch...@christopherschultz.net>]

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André,

Finally off-topic.

On 7/20/2010 4:18 AM, André Warnier wrote:
> To achieve anything other than relatively trivial with Tomcat, at some
> point you'll need to become very competent with Java.

Not necessarily. You might have to become familiar with things like
fully-qualified class names and a few specific tools necessary for
proper configuration (like cluster implementations, etc.), but Tomcat
administration need not carry with it any deep programming knowledge.
It's always good to know a good Java dev, though, in case you get in
over your head.

> Being competent
> with Java is a lifetime occupation, not because of the language itself,
> but because achieving anything worthwhile with it requires learning
> about many, many class libraries and their API's.
> (Anyone challenging the above ?)

Mmmm... I wouldn't say that's unique to Java. You're a Perl fanboy, and
Perl is ... an art in and of itself.

> In comparison Apache httpd has, built-in, many features that just
> require configuration, and already has many ready-to-use add-on modules
> which just require to be plugged-in and configured, without having to do
> any programming at all.

Note that using Tomcat as a web server is nearly as trivial to set up as
Apache httpd: anything that you'd make into a DocumentRoot is a webapp
rooted in a single directory. Anything you'd "Alias" onto the filesystem
must be the same.

> In both cases, some knowledge of the HTTP protocol is a must, and a good
> knowledge of HTTP is a tremendous help.

+1

You can't administer a server for a system you don't understand. You
don't need to know exactly how a router works, but you need to know what
it's accomplishing.

> Technically, I think that Christopher's earlier benchmarks showed that
> Tomcat can serve simple static content at least as well as Apache httpd.
> Using Apache httpd as a front-end to Tomcat introduces some overhead,
> but with a correct configuration this overhead will be insignificant in
> most real-world situations, compared to what can be achieved (in terms
> of unnecessary overhead) by bad coding in the applications themselves,
> whether they are running under Tomcat or under Apache.

+1

If Tomcat and httpd are on the same machine, the overhead is likely to
be minimal (I haven't httpd->Tomcat performance) due to the tricks most
TCP/IP stacks play with localhost traffic to make it super fast.

Your webapp usually sucks way more than the server ;)

- -chris
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