Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Well, to follow the Webmonkey server side scripting shootout, I though I would bring up Tomcat. This is the reference implementation developed by Sun and handed over to the Apache group for continued development. It is a JavaServer engine that can be rolled into your favorite webserver, or used with its own built in streamlined webserver. The lastest stable is 3.0 released 15 Dec 1999.First off, my rant: I had Tomcat up and running on RedHat 6.1, WinNT, even Win98 in about 40 minutes flat on all platforms. I have yet to be able to make it run on Solaris 7. One would think a product developed by Sun would run pretty sweet on a Sun box, but nay-- still worse the pkg file for solaris was missing the critical webserver.jar file and I had to copy it out of the Windows version.

• RedHat issues:Next to none. The Blackdown/Sun JDK1.2.2 libs run great.
• Windows XX issues:You can't use Tomcats administration functions with the Microsoft JVM because MS doesn't include the RMI in its JVM. Download the Sun JVM, but if you expect the JDBC to work, use the java1.2 tools.jar file from Borland and not Suns. Don't ask me why. I just know the Sun JDBC did not want to connect to my MS-SQL server. hmmm.
• Solaris: I'm still working on making this one run. Don't forget to tweak out your classpath on this one as the tomcatEnv.sh script doesn't seem to work properly... An extract the webserver.jar file from another distro.

Overlooking all the above problems, I would generally have to give Tomcat a good review. Besides, we all better get used to it as the Apache group sees Tomcat as the successor to JServ for Apache, and it does support JSP 1.1 out of the box (I could be wrong here, but I think it is the only JSP engine that comes with 1.1 right now).   Jakarta-Tomcat