Summary

Congratulations! You have successfully completed one of the most complex chapters in this book. We had a lot of ground to cover in this chapter, with general concepts and Tomcat implementation specifics flying fast and furious.

In the first part of this chapter, we considered the configuration of both the context aspect, as well as the web application aspect of this component. We also looked at the multitude of configuration files that may be brought to bear on these two aspects.

Next, we looked at a number of general concepts. We considered a JNDI-based Directory service implementation that was used to access a web application's resources in a storage-independent manner. We took an in-depth look at class loading principles in general and at the Tomcat web application class loader in particular. We then toured the arena of Java protocol handlers and considered an implementation of the jndi custom protocol that is used to access context resources in a generic manner. Finally, we looked...