We opted to use Tomcat as an add-on to Apache when developing our servlets. This allows static html documents to be served at a fast speed while allowing Tomcat to serve the dynamic content of our html documents. There may be precompiled binaries for your OS available at the Jakarta website. A shell script that is provided with the Tomcat source may then be used to build the java class files. Be sure that all the environment variables are correctly defined.
Tomcat needs a javac to work correctly.
Configuring Tomcat to work with Apache Tomcat automatically generates a configuration file to load itself into Apache as an add-on that can be include ed into your http.conf file. Tomcat must be started before Apache for this to work. Tomcat is loaded as a module. To create this module, which is a slightly modified version of the standard JSP module, you must build it from source which comes with Tomcat. To do this use the Apache tool apxs.