Friday I decided to be a complete and utter geek and install Apache Tomcat on my Mac.  I know, I know you’re asking me “But Rosalyn Apache comes with a Mac, why do you need Tomcat?”  Well that’s a good question.  And the answer is I wanted to install XTF which is an XML publishing tool developed by CDL (California Digital Library), and XTF requires that you use Tomcat in order to run it (or you can use Resin…but I’m an Apache fan).

So now you’re thinking, “How did you do it?”  I wish I could have thought it up on my own, but saddly I didn’t.  I looked at a few pages and then finally settled on Basil Borque’s section (under Update 2006) on this wiki page: http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/TomcatOnMacOS.  Bravo to Basil for posting the directions.  I didn’t bother with the firewall though because my laptop is behind a firewall by default.  Also I wanted to still run Apache so I left Tomcat on its default port 8080.

Once I got Tomcat up and running, I then moved on to XTF.  This process was ridiculously easy.  CDL has wonderful XTF installation directions on the SourceForge XTF Wiki.  If you’re on Wheaton’s Campus (and my computer is currently connected to the internet) you can view XTF here.