Configuring Tomcat with IIS Web Server

In this article, we are going to continue our Tomcat Connector discussions with a look at how to configure Tomcat and Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) using the JK v1.2 Connectors.

Note: This article assumes that you have completed the steps from the previous article, "Configuring Tomcat and Apache With JK 1.2." If you have not already completed these steps, please go back to the article and complete steps 3-7.

Preparing Your Environment

To connect IIS to the Tomcat server, we are going to leverage a Microsoft technology called ISAPI. We don't need to know much about this technology; we simply need to make use of an existing Dynamic Link Library (DLL) that has already been built and is available here.

The file you are looking for is isapi_redirector.dll, which exists in the win32/ subdirectory.

Once you have this file, you then need to complete the following steps:

1. Install IIS as described in its packaged documentation. This article assumes that you will be running IIS 5.x.

2. Test the IIS installation, by starting IIS and opening your browser to http://localhost.

If everything went according to plan, you should now see images similar to the following.

Configuring Tomcat and IIS with the JK 1.2 Connector

Now that IIS is installed, it is time to begin the actual integration between IIS and Tomcat. This process can be broken down into two sections: configuring Tomcat, and configuring IIS. The result of our integration will make the Tomcat examples Web application available through IIS.

Configuring Tomcat

The complete Tomcat configuration was described a previous article, "Configuring Tomcat and Apache with JK 1.2."

Configuring IIS

Once Tomcat is configured, it is time to configure IIS. We do this by telling IIS that it should pass all requests to the examples context to Tomcat for processing. This is a relatively simple process and is broken down into the following four steps:

1. Creating a Tomcat Worker File

We begin the IIS configuration, just as we did with Apache, by creating a Tomcat worker definition. This worker definition is used to tell IIS how it is to talk to Tomcat. This is done by creating a Tomcat worker file that contains the definition for at least one Tomcat worker.

Note: We discussed the worker.properties file in the previous article, so I will only provide a source listing. If you did not read the previous article, this would be a good time to check it out.

worker.list=testWorker

worker.testWorker.port=8009

worker.testWorker.host=localhost

worker.testWorker.type=ajp13

If this file does not exist, create it, add the previous lines, and copy it to the <CATALINA_HOME>/conf directory of the Tomcat instance that you will be integrating with IIS.

Note: <CATALINA_HOME> represents the base directory of your Tomcat installation.