Taming Tomcat

Author and presenter: Simon Brooke.

The full text of this presentation is online at <URL: http://www.weft.co.uk/library/tomcat/>

Written March-April 2006; $Revision: 1.5 $ of $Date: 2006/05/02 13:19:34 $

Changes to the presentation since your handouts were printed are highlighted like this.

Simon Brooke, 21 Main Street, Auchencairn, DG7 1QU, Scotland.

Day 1: The Basics next

Day 2: Development and Administation next

Day 3: Security and Performance next

Notes after the first presentation of this course

All IT training courses are always works in progress until they become obsolete. Software develops and changes too fast for a course to remain useful for long without regularly being updated. This course is published under creative commons license in the hope that if other people use it to train, they will communicate their fixes and improvements back to me.

This course was first presented to customers of Local Planet in Bellshill in April 2006. As always the first presentation of a course throws up some problems, which I'll need to work on. A particular issue is I deliberately tried to teach on a mixture of Windows and Debian platforms, and students on different versions of Tomcat. I thought this would give the students an opportunity to experience a wide range of Tomcat installations. However it proved desperately problematic to teack on, with a need for slightly different instructions to different students in each of the excersises.

I'd make a strong recommendation that you choose a single platform, with a consistent versions of Tomcat, Apache and your database of choice before you embark on your course. In particular, if your students are used to Windows, be aware how much frustration and distraction their lack of experience of UNIX permissions and editors will cause.

Pre-requisites

You can't teach a course about something like Tomcat without assuming some level of software competence. However, it's always surprising how narrow some people's IT competence is, and even experienced software people may struggle when presented with programming languages outside their experience. I have to remember that not everyone treats a computer as a magnificent toy box, full of exciting things to play with!

If your users have no experience of Java, you should probably drop the JSP exercise at the end of day one. If your users have no experience of SQL, you should either drop the database authentication exercise on day three, or else prepare a ready-to-use database in advance.