Chapter 7. The Engine Component

So far in our journey, we have encountered the Server, Service, and Connector components. The Server and Service are categorized as Top Level Components, and represent structural aspects of a Tomcat instance. The Server represents the running instance of Tomcat, while a Service represents a grouping of Connectors that feed a single Engine. A Connector component, in turn, represents a connection endpoint for a given Service.

In this chapter, you will be introduced to additional types of components within Tomcat— Containers and Nested Components.

A Container is a request processing component within Tomcat, and includes the Engine, Host, Context, and Wrapper components. Containers live in a parent-child style compositional hierarchy, where a parent container contains one or more child containers, each of which may contain other child containers. Tomcat's container components implement the org.apache.catalina.Container interface.

A Nested Component is a child of...