Hermanland

When receiving a http request, how does the system determine whether the request will be processed by Apache http server or Tomcat server? Ideally, all static pages should be served by web server and dynamically generated pages be served by Tomcat server. However, the Apache http server is more capable than just serving static pages e.g. the server can process php script very well. A simple scheme may be the full tomcat redirection where any http request ended without file extension or with jsp as the file extension will be served by tomcat. It is the default setup configured by most ISP. This makes the use of friendly url for those pages that should be served by the http server impossible. Even we limit ourself to using the file extension url pattern only, the full redirection cannot handle the case e.g. http://hermanland.com/wp/?p=4 where the default file is index.php. Even though we create an index.html meta refresh page to index.php, the query string will be lost during the meta refresh. A better solution is to configure the http server to disable the auto redirection for certain pattern of url. Furthermore, the friendly url such as http://hermanland.com/wp/2008/06/fujifilm-f31fd is more search engine friendly than http://hermanland.com/wp/?p=4.

Hermanland was created in cyberspace to share my working experience in Information Technologies and application system development on Java platform in particular. The website disappeared from the Internet by the end of 2006 because of the breakdown of my home server where the website was hosted. Recently, I notice it has become more cost effective to host a Java application on some Internet Service Provider. Hence, Hermanland is back to cyberspace again.