connectors/webapp/docs/index.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<document title="Introduction">
  <description>
    The WebApp Module for the Apache Web Server
  </description>

  <section title="Description">
    <description>
      What is the WebApp Module
    </description>

    <p>
      Do you remember the old times of <b>mod_jserv</b>? Maybe you're too
      young, but I do pretty well. At that time, the amazing <b>Apache
      JServ</b> 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.
    </p>

    <p>
      And this is when a "module" came into the picture: a module such
      as <b>mod_jserv</b> or the <b>WebApp</b> 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.
    </p>

    <p>
      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!).
    </p>

  </section>

  <section title="Purpose">
    <description>
      Why should I use the WebApp Module?
    </description>

    <p>
      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.
    </p>

    <p>
      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.
    </p>

    <p>
      If instead you're an adventurous geek who's up for a challenge, skip
      the rest of this document and go to the <a href="building.xml"/>
      section, there's where the fun starts.
    </p>

  </section>


  <section title="Alternatives">
    <description>
      Are there alternative ways to connect Apache and Tomcat?
    </description>

    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    
    <p>
      <b>Tomcat's internal HTTP stack and mod_proxy</b>, 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.
    </p>

    <p>
      <b>mod_jk</b>, 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).
    </p>

  </section>

</document>