akarta Tomcat, an Open Source Servlet and JSP container, provides a simple (and free) environment for developing and testing Web applications. Tomcat is the reference implementation for the Servlet API and JSP. It's not a high-performance Servlet engine, but it is a complete implementation of the Servlet API.

For developers accustomed to GUI-driven Windows applications, installing Tomcat can be frustrating. In this article, I'll give you a step-by-step procedure to install and configure Tomcat on the Windows platform.

Java Servlets provide a framework for creating Web applications. Servlets are Java classes that use the Servlet API to accept a Request object from the browser and produce a Response object. For those of you familiar with Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology, Java Server Pages (JSP) are similar but they use compiled Java Servlets rather than an interpreted scripting language. Like ASP pages, JSP pages consist of code mixed with HTML. The JSP hosting engine, commonly referred to as a "JSP container," converts the pages to a Servlet, then compiles and executes them.

The Tomcat engine is a Java program. Before you can run Tomcat, you must have the Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.2 or later installed on your computer.