HTTP vs AJP in Apache and Tomcat | The Coding Craftsman

HTTP vs AJP in Apache and Tomcat | The Coding Craftsman

HTTP

• Simple
• Already provided by all servers
• Easily configured in Apache
• The most likely target of a security breach

AJP

• Well supported
• More compact a protocol
• Easily configured in Apache and Tomcat

AJP looks slightly ahead for two reasons:

• You're not opening up HTTP on Tomcat (in fact you should close it for security)
• As it's a more compact protocol, there's less traffic between the front server and the back server

Except… if the front server is on the same network segment, or even on the same machine, then there's no advantage from the compactness of the protocol unless you have a huge number of tiny requests to serve.

Similarly, if the whole server is not visible to the whole internet because it's behind a load balancer, then it doesn't matter whether http is open on Tomcat as nobody could get there to use it.

Simple is better, so I declare HTTP the winner.

Read full article from HTTP vs AJP in Apache and Tomcat | The Coding Craftsman