Tomcat knowledge needed?

[Henrik Jacobsen]

Hi,

I have been using JIRA/ServiceDesk/Confluence for some time now and see myself as pretty good at setting up and working with projects, for our team within the company.

At this point I have no idea about Tomcat and what I have needed so far have been fixed using either Atlassian Questions and basic internet search.

My question how much would I benefit, JIRA wise, from improving my knowledge of Tomcat and to what point/level.
and where would be my first stop in learning Tomcat? 

[João Palharini]

Hi Henrik!

It's great to hear you're interested in improving your knowledge on JIRA.

So, Tomcat is JIRA's container, JIRA won't work if there's any problem with its bundled Tomcat configuration. It's actually an engine developed by Apache that is able to make Java applications available on the network. Basically, it's a Java Virtual Machine.

Also, knowing Tomcat will allow you to configure additional settings of JIRA, such as running it behind a proxy, setting up SSL connections and tuning the application's performance more effectively.

In my opinion, the first step to understand Tomcat is to understand what is a JVM and how it works. This guide has a pretty good explanation of it. Also, this document points out some worthy topics on performance tuning a JVM.

Then, you can learn more about Catalina, which is Tomcat's core component. You'll find a good introduction to it here.

Let me know if you need any additional clarification on any of the above. I'll be happy to help you.

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Cheers!

Joao