Chapter 6. The Connector Component

In Tomcat, the Connector component provides the protocol-specific implementation of a web server. At its most basic level, this component monitors a particular port for incoming requests, receives requests that conform to a given protocol such as HTTP 1.1 or AJP 1.3, translates these requests into a canonical form that conforms to the servlet specification, hands these requests to the engine for processing, and returns the generated response to the client. In doing so, it insulates the remainder of the Catalina request processing engine from the specifics of any given protocol.

This component is composed of so many cooperating classes that it may be termed more correctly as the connector subsystem. The Connector class itself is only responsible for the bootstrapping of this subsystem. The remainder of this subsystem is comprised of the following:

• An endpoint connection acceptor that receives all incoming connections

• A protocol handler that implements a protocol...