Chapter 9. The Context Component

In this chapter, we will take a closer look at one of the most complex components of Tomcat, the context. Fortunately for us, this component makes up for its complexity by also being one of the most interesting components within the Tomcat firmament.

A lot of its complexity arises from the very central role that this component plays within Tomcat. As shown in the following image, the Context not only implements core request processing functionality, but also plays a key role in orchestrating the activities of a number of helper components.

This includes managing access to the application's resources, orchestrating the loading of an application's classes, providing a naming service, handling web application security, and registering servlets and filters.

In this chapter, we will look at a number of these nested components and their implementations. We'll take a particularly close look at how Tomcat's custom class loader allows each context to have its own private...