Quiet before the storm?
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Thursday, March 29. 2007 in Programming
Yesterday, Filip Hanik and I co-presented a webinar that we thought would have created more controversy than it has (not that creating controversy was the goal). The webinar was about interfacing Apache httpd and Tomcat efficiently and reliably. From a support point of view, we've seen countless issues related to AJP, and with the recent advances within httpd and Tomcat, the summary of the presentation was simply to drop AJP, stay with HTTP all the way and use Apache httpd -> mod_proxy -> Tomcat HTTP connector (basically, treat httpd as a "standard" reverse proxy and Tomcat as a backend HTTP server). Fronting Tomcat with Apache httpd still makes a LOT of sense (Mladen Turk's ApacheCon presentation looks to be very interesting and, although not likely to support the conclusion that AJP causes more harm than help, appears to support the general topic that an Apache httpd -> Tomcat implementation is still the best layout by far) but maybe AJP's time has come... HTTP itself has certainly shown itself to be pretty good enough to create scalable infrastructure around snicker
Anyway, I really think that Filip and I are just enjoying the quiet before the "storm"... Before Apache 2.2 and the APR/NIO Tomcat connectors, such a concept would have been dismissed out of hand. Today, it has some teeth.