There was a lively discussion a couple of weeks ago on the Resin interest mailing list about why people are using Apache with Resin and whether it’s actually necessary. Of course, we recommend that our users use Resin as both the HTTP server and the app server, but sometimes that’s not possible because of other legacy apps, non-Java apps on the same host, or simply internal politics. The trend in the non-Java world lately has been to move away from Apache to nginx because of its simple configuration and raw speed. For backend applications, it uses simple proxying or FastCGI instead of the mod_* model of Apache. I decided to check out nginx this morning and see how to hook up Resin. Turns out that it’s pretty easy!

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