Right then, this is Friday afternoon talking, and it's telling me to draw a line under this enterprise and reassess it on Monday morning. The story so far:

1. Tomcat 5 is working fine, delivering our pages and handling virtual hosting. It has the functional potential to server our entire site on its own - performance not yet tested.
2. Apache 2 is also just dandy.
3. Using mod_jk 1.2.5 to link the two works, provided they communicate over the ajp13 protocol. This requires you to start both separately.
4. The more efficent and more automatic integration, whereby the two communicate over JNI and apache starts up Tomcat on its own, doesn't work. It falls down because we haven't got an implementation of org.apache.tomcat.modules.server.JNIEndpoint
5. I suspect that no-one has got this combination working. There are q and a's on the web relating to the ajp13 communication, but nothing about jni with these versions. We're beyond the bleeding edge and it's cold out here.
6. An alternative is to upgrade to mod_jk2, but the current release won't even compile.

Subject to thinking about it over the weekend, I'm inclined to follow this rough plan:

a) Try to get mod_jk2 compiling.
b) Based on (a), get JNI integration working.
c) If it's really not happening, benchmark Tomcat solo vs. Tomcat + Apache over ajp13 with mod_jk.
d) Adopt the winning config, put it live and start improving the web app (mmm - custom taglibs...).

We're due for a jar update next week, so I'm looking for the winner to go up the following Monday. Reckon that's the 17th then.

A change of pace for the rest of the afternoon: Time to put the atlas live.

T
- posted by Tim Bruce @ 2:51 PM