The Apache HTTP server is one of the most widely used frontend web servers across the IT industry. This project was open sourced in 1995 and is owned by The Apache Software Foundation.
This chapter is very useful for the web administrator who works on enterprise-level web integration. It gives a very good idea about how integration is implemented in IT organizations. So, if you are thinking of enhancing your career in enterprise-level integrations of applications, then read this chapter carefully.
In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:
- The Apache HTTP installation
- The various modules of Apache
- Integration of Apache with Tomcat 7
- How IT industry environments are set up
Before we discuss the installation of Apache, let's discuss a high-level overview of how the request flows from the web and application server for an application in IT industries. The following figure shows the process flow for a user request, in a web application. The step-by-step involvement of each component is as follows:
- The user hits the URL in the browser and the request goes to the HTTP server instead of Tomcat.
- The HTTP server accepts the request and redirects it to Tomcat for business logic processing.
- Tomcat internally contacts the database server to fetch the data, and sends the response back to the user through the same channel of request:
