Is Apache/Tomcat an alternative for us?

[Eyvind Almquist]

The mission was to set up a Java-application with servlets. The persons to perform this task was two IT-consultants who both had previous experience from setting up webservers and web-based applications. Apache webserver 1.3.11 was already installed and had been used for some time to serve static content. Since Apache webserver do not have support for servlets we needed to install Tomcat also. This is how the work proceeded:   Tomcat 3.2.1 was installed on the Unix-machine. According to the Tomcat website this was "the latest release quality Tomcat build". Apache webserver was stopped. Then we tried to start Tomcat. However it refused to start until we changed the configuration-script to another port than 8007. Then we changed the Apache configuration file to include the Tomcat configuration file.   To connect Apache and Tomcat we needed to get  a webserver-adapter called Jserv. The User guide for Tomcat says that we need to compile the source-files for Jserv to get a working version for our OS (Solaris 5). After an extensive detective work we found the needed source-file in the source version of Tomcat. The detective work took a very long time, since these files where not in the place indicated by the  User guide for Tomcat. So we downloaded the source for Tomcat 3.2.1. We located the source-files for Jserv. Then we moved to that directory and ran the commands for compiling. However these commands didn't succed, since they called a Perl-script and we didn't have Perl on our machine. Since Perl was not included in the Apache server or our version of Solaris, we needed to install the Perl parser.   We found Perl  5.005_03 for Solaris on  Netscape's site and installed it. However the Perl parser didn't accept the included script from Tomcat for compiling called "apxs" due to several errors in it. So we now have three alternatives.   Alternative 1   Skip Apache web-server and use another one that can handle Java-servlets better. If we used a Java-based web-server with built-in support for servlets we wouldn't need a webserver-adapter like Jserv and no seperate servlet-engine like Tomcat.   Alternative 2   Download another version of Tomcat and hope that the Perl-script apxs and everything else in it is correct this time.   Alternative 3   Download another version of the Perl-parser and hope that it accepts the Perl-script apxs.   Does anyone has any opionons on what alternative we should go for or some other alternative? We also need the webserver to handle SSL, which means that we later would have to download and install a module for that, since our Apache web-server don't support that.   Eyvind Almquist Tietoenator Consulting