Summary

We covered a lot of ground in this chapter. We began by looking at the principles behind a servlet container. We looked at the origins of Tomcat, and we built ourselves our very own server by cobbling together a number of software helpers.

We looked at the JDK, the Ant build tool, the Subversion version control tool, and the Eclipse IDE. We retrieved the latest source from the Tomcat Subversion repository, and we compiled the Java sources to result in a binary distribution of the container.

In the next chapter, we'll explore some of the ideas embodied in the servlet specification.