Tomcat & Apache experiences

[Ben Hutchison <Be...@finetix.com>]

Hi all,

I have been trying to set an Apache server with Tomcat under Windows. It hasnt been as easy as it could be. I have a few issues with both distributions and docs which Im going to describe here. 

First up, I tried running Tomcat 4.0b3 with Apache. 

It requires the user to build mod_webapp. I tried with Cygwin gcc and it failed. I think it would greatly ease uptake and user testing of Tomcat 4.0 betas if a Windows binary was provided by somebody who knows how to build it. Windows doesnt have the default tool support or culture of unixes for easy building of C source. The most popular windows compiler, Visual C++, isnt freely available. Under windows, you cant just type "make all" and expect it to work on a standard machine like you can on UNIX. 

So then I fell back to Tomcat 3.2.1. 

It seems that the bin/startup.bat and bin/tomcat.bat scripts are broken by default. They specify Tomcat_Home as '.', the current cirectory, not '..', the parent.

I found duplication in the Tomcat documentation on Apache integration which confused me. In the main user guide, could a link be placed across to Tomcat-Apache How To, rather than the current superceeded section text?

I went to JServ and downloaded the windows .exe installer to get the jserv DLL. It demanded the location of the JSDK directory, (which no longer exists?) and then deleted all its files when I didnt provide it. Workaround: I re-ran it and killed the process when it had unpacked the files.

After that it worked fine.

Regards
Ben