If you do a Google search on Tomcat Connectors, you will find a lot of old, out dated advice on what connector to choose. In today's computing environment, in a blog posted today on Tomcatexpert.com is SpringSource's recommendation to only consider the following connectors:
Mark Thomas, Spring engineer and Tomcat committer, starts out the article caveating his experience with SpringSource customers:
My experience with providing support to SpringSource customers is that a typical customer is more likely to hit a bug in mod_proxy_ajp than they are in mod_jk or mod_proxy_http. It isn't that mod_proxy_ajp is particularly buggy, I used it myself for 18 months on a production system without a single issue, but that it has a few more bugs than the other two modules. The situation is improving but at the time of writing I would rank mod_jk and mod_proxy_http above mod_proxy_ajp.
Ultimately, Thomas breaks it down to four simple rules:
- If you need to encrpt the httpd to Tomcat channel, use mod_proxy_http
- If you need to expose SSL information to your web applciation, use mod_jk
- If you are alreay using one of these modules then changing is likely to cause more hassle than it saves
- Given a completely free choice, I'd use mod_proxy_http just because the configuration is more consistent with other httpd modules.
For more details on Mark's guidance, see the original article titled Deciding between mod_jk, mod_proxy_http and mod_proxy_ajp.