Appendix C. Installing and Running Tomcat 5.5
In order to address the needs of a variety of server-side systems, some of the chapters in this book use Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP) as their back-end mechanism. In order to run the examples for these chapters, it is necessary to set up an application server that is Servlets 2.4 and JSP 2.0 capable.
But not to fear! The free and easily obtained Tomcat 5.5 server is a snap to set up, and requires no knowledge of Java to do so. This appendix will walk you through obtaining and setting up your Tomcat server.
This, of course, assumes that you have Java, itself, installed upon your system. If not, please visit the Sun site for details on installing Java 1.5 for your operating system. (This is also a not-too-arduous task).
You can download Tomcat 5.5 from the Apache Tomcat site at http://tomcat.apache.org/download-55.cgi (see figure C.1). Version 5.5.20 is the latest stable build at the time of this writing, but you’ll probably want to grab the most recent 5.5 version that is available.
For Windows, you’ll want to grab the Core.zip file (avoid the Windows executable—it does a much deeper installation than is needed for simply running the examples). For Mac OS X and other Unix systems, download the Core .tar.gz file. Be sure to avoid the pgp and md5 links—you don’t need encrypted downloads.