Rogue Wolves

Recently I've had to do some SOA development using Java and Tomcat. I've never dipped my toes into Java web service development so it's a new world to me. Compared to ASP.NET it seems very convoluted with many different frameworks and conflicting/incomplete/outdated tutorials. I ended up using Axis2 as the framework but wanting to develop on OS X I had to install a servlet container to host my web services. I also wanted to integrate this into Apache for various reasons. After some research and searching here is a process I came up with to install Tomcat on OS X using Apache.

These instructions are for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with JDK 1.5 and Tomcat 5.5:

Step 1: Download Tomcat and JK source

You can download Tomcat from this link

In order to integrate Tomcat with Apache you need to use the JK Apache module. I downloaded the source for the module and compiled it. You can download the JK Apache module source from this link

Step 2: Install Apache Tomcat

First unpack apache tomcat (double click the file in the Finder) then move folder to /usr/local (or optionally /Library)


sudo mv apache-tomcat-5.5.20 /usr/local


Next create a symbolic link in /usr/local for tomcat. I do this to make it easier to update tomcat versions later.


sudo ln -s apache-tomcat-5.5.20 tomcat


Step 3: Build and install the JK module for Apache

Unpack JK module (double click the file in the Finder) and then open a Terminal and change to the directory that contains the JK source code native directory. You need to build the module from source code to do this issue these commands: