Summary
In this chapter, we took an up close and personal look at the roles that the Server top level container plays in a Tomcat instance. The Server serves its containment role by acting as a container for one or more Service instances that are configured in the Tomcat instance. It takes its responsibilities as a container seriously by invoking the appropriate life cycle methods on its services.
In addition, it initializes the global JNDI naming context from the elements that are configured into the<GlobalNamingResources> element of the server.xml configuration file. It also plays an active role in bootstrapping the JMX registration process. It then waits, listening patiently on a configured port, for a command to shut down the Tomcat instance.
The Service instance, on the other hand, is fairly trivial and does nothing more than serve as a structural construct that associates one or more Connectors with an Engine.
