Originally posted by Rahul Bhattacharjee:
But in production a web container is also recomended to take help of a full blown web server.That is why many tomcats at production is connected with Apache web server using mod JK.In this case the request for the static contenet are taken care by the Apache Web server and the servet requests are served by tomcat.
This used to be the case.
These days it is becoming more common to deploy on Tocmat as a standalone server. Both the JVM and Tomcat itself have improved (performance wise) enough that the overhead of connecting to webserver is often more expensive than using the webserver capabilities of Tomcat, by itself.
There may be other reasons to connect to a webserver, such as the need for ASP, PHP, or Perl support, but for performance, Tomcat does just fine on it's own.