I'm primarily a Java developer, and I come to you with a question that straddles the divide between developers and sysadmins.
Years ago, when it was a novel thing to run Tomcat as an app server, it was customary to front it with Apache. As I understand it, this was done because:
- Java was considered "slow", and it was helpful to have Apache serve static content directly.
- Tomcat couldn't listen to ports 80/443 unless run as root, which was dangerous.
Java is no longer considered slow, and I doubt adding Apache to the mix will actually help speed things up.
As for the ports issue, there are probably simpler ways to connect app servers to ports 80/443 these days.
So my question is- is there really any benefit to fronting Java Webapps with Apache these days? If so, is Apache still the way to go? Should I look at Nginx? Instead of Tomcat I'm using Glassfish, if that matters.
Best Answer
Most people are going to say you need something in-front because of static files.
This is somewhat dumb because:
The real reason you need something in-front of tomcat/jetty/jboss to load balance and handle failover.
I recommend you do not listen to "...The Tomcat engine is the Achilles heel of the entire ecosphere..." as we all know that is not true... your database and its connection pooling will be that.