Mac OS X includes a default installation of the popular, effective web server Apache. In fact, the " personal web sharing" functionality of Mac OS X, available from the Network control panel, merely provides a nice graphical user interface on top of the Apache web server.
Figure 13-10 illustrates the browser and servers installed to handle a Java-based n-tier web application. Apache receives requests from the client browser for dynamically generated application content and then forwards them to the Java application server, which can then build a response from the SQL database. Apache handles client-browser requests for static content (such as images or large downloadable files) directly.
To get Tomcat 4.0.4 and Apache to talk to each other, either download and build the source for the connector yourself or download a prebuilt binary. Fortunately, Chad Thompson has already provided instructions on how to do this at O'Reilly's macdevcenter.com, available at http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/08/20/tomcat_integration.html.