What is the WebApp Module

Do you remember the old times of mod_jserv? Maybe you're too young, but I do pretty well. At that time, the amazing Apache JServ servlet container didn't have an HTTP stack per se, but rather relied on the Apache 1.2 and 1.3 web server to have clients accessing it.

And this is when a "module" came into the picture: a module such as mod_jserv or the WebApp module connects the HTTP stack of the front end web-server(s) with one or more instances of a servlet container in the back end.

The WebApp module does exactly that, it's not finished (it might never will), but it works, and it works pretty damn good. Plus (this comes for free), we tried very hard to keep the internals clean and well-designed, so that it will be so easy for anyone to simply provide patches in case of bugs (yes, there are some!).

Why should I use the WebApp Module?

Because we say so? Not kidding, but it's really up to you, there are several alternatives to "do the job", when we started this project all of them were (in our not-so-humble-opinion), a pile of crap.

Lately there have been some improvements on those alternatives, and probably, if you're wondering why you want to try out WebApp, you should really stop reading now, and go and download something else.

If instead you're an adventurous geek who's up for a challenge, skip the rest of this document and go to the Building WebApp section, there's where the fun starts.

Are there alternative ways to connect Apache and Tomcat?

It would NOT be fair not to talk about our lovely (???) competitors, of course, otherwise someone might even start calling us names, so, in brief, you can use the following alternatives:

Tomcat's internal HTTP stack and mod_proxy, which is not that bad, but slow, well, of course Tomcat didn't have 8/9 years of C routine optimization like the Apache Web Server, but it's quite good. The only disadvantage I see is that it looks pretty ridiculous to parse an HTTP request to generate it again (exactly the same), and to parse again the response to send it back unchanged... Anyway.

mod_jk, is the same of the WebApp module, if you're wondering why you should be using the latter instead of the former, well, I believe I already answered this question (forget about WebApp).