Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Where Did Tomcat Come From?

The first Java servlet container was Sun Microsystems's Java Web Server (JWS). Sun's Java Web Server was a product that Sun offered for sale. It was more affordable than most commercial server offerings, but it did not enjoy widespread commercial success—largely due to Java still being new, and servlets being only recently introduced. One of Java Web Server's main outgrowths, however, was the Java Servlet Specification as a de facto standard that Sun documented and made available separately. One big success of JWS was that it put Java servlets in the limelight.

In 1996, a plethora of free Java servlet containers became popular. Apache's JServ and CERN/W3C's Jigsaw were two of the earliest open source Java servlet containers. They were quickly followed by several more, including Jetty (http://jetty.mortbay.org), the Locomotive Application Server (see the web archives at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.locomotive.org), Enhydra (http://www.enhydra.org), and many others. At the same time, commercial servlet containers were starting to become available as the industry embraced the Java Servlet standard; some of these were WebLogic's Tengah, ATG's Dynamo, and LiveSoftware's JRun.

In 1997, Sun released its first version of the Java Servlet Development Kit (JSDK). The JSDK was a very small servlet container that supported JSP and had a built-in HTTP 1.0 web server. In an effort to provide a reference implementation for developing servlets, Sun made it available as a free download to anyone wanting to experiment with the new Java server-side standard. It also had success as a testing and development platform in preparation for deployment to a commercial server.

In the first half of 1998, Sun announced its new JSP specification, which built upon the Java Servlet API and allowed more rapid development of dynamic web application content. After the 2.1 release of the JSDK (now called the JSWDK to add "Web" to the name), James Duncan Davidson at Sun rewrote the core of the older JSDK server. At the heart of this new Java servlet engine reference implementation was a brand new servlet container named Tomcat, and its version number started at 3.0 because it was a follow-on to version 2.1 that it replaced.

Why the Name Tomcat?

Tomcat was created when James Duncan Davidson (then an employee at Sun) wrote a new server based on the Servlet and JSP idea but without using any code from JWS.

As James put it when we asked him about this, "O'Reilly books have animals on the covers. So what animal would I want on the cover of the O'Reilly book covering the technology?

"Furthermore, I wanted the animal to be something that was self-sufficient. Able to take care of itself, even if neglected, etc. Tomcat came out of that thought."

He code-named it Tomcat, and the name was effectively obscured from view because it was the internal engine of the JSWDK, and not a product name. Until ". . . at the 4th JavaOne, somebody asked about it in the audience as they had decompiled the sources and wanted to know what com.sun.tomcat was."

As the servlet and JSP specifications' reference implementation, Tomcat evolved rapidly. As the specifications became rich with features, so did Tomcat and with it the JSWDK. For various reasons, James and Sun wanted to open the code to the JSWDK. This was largely so developers everywhere could examine how servlets and JSPs operated. Here's what Jason Hunter of the Apache Software Foundation says about what happened next:

Sun wanted to spread the adoption of the technology, especially JSP, and Apache was a good venue to enable that. From what James said at the time and since, they wouldn't have open sourced it on their own except if Apache (with majority web server marketshare) would take the code, well then! What's funny is Sun gave it for JSP, Apache took it for servlets.

Nevertheless, the open source Tomcat project has enjoyed rapid development in areas including both servlets and JSP functionality from the developer community since its donation to the Apache Software Foundation.

Being freely distributable, backed by both Sun and the Apache Software Foundation, being the reference implementation for the Java Servlet Specification, and being all-around "cool," Tomcat went on to redefine the very meaning of a Java server, let alone a servlet container. Today, Tomcat is one of the most widely used open source software packages and is a collaborative project bustling with activity every day of the year.

While Tomcat's popularity steadily increased, Sun Microsystems moved on to develop a new reference implementation—this time for all of Java EE. The Glassfish Java EE server is the new reference implementation, and the web container component of Glassfish is based heavily on Tomcat. Meanwhile, Tomcat remains the most popular, most widely used open source servlet container implementation. All open source Java EE application server implementations include Tomcat, in whole or in part. Tomcat remains 100 percent compliant with Sun's latest specifications for servlets, JSP, and other Java EE web container specifications.