7. What is Tomcat and how is it different from Apache?

     This was one of the more difficult questions for me to answer, not because I couldn’t find any information but because I couldn’t understand a lot of what I read. Fortunately, I found an article by Ellis (2004), who works for Well House Consultants, that helped to clear up some of the confusion.

Ellis (2004) explains that Tomcat is a servlet (i.e., a server-side program) that provides an environment on which to run Java scripts that are accessible via web browsers. Further, Tomcat is an industry standard, a measure against which other servlet providers should conform. Apache is the original C version of an HTTP web server. It is used for the majority of websites worldwide, and it can serve both static and dynamic content.

Tomcat is related to Apache via Jakarta, an Apache project that deals with open source additions in Java. Jakarta has over 20 sub-projects, of which Tomcat is one.

References

Ellis, G. J. (2004). Tomcat overview. Retrieved July 18, 2008 from

     http://www.wellho.co.uk/downloads/A651.pdf