History
Tomcat started off as a servlet reference implementation by James Duncan Davidson, a software architect at Sun Microsystems. He later helped make the project open source and played a key role in its donation by Sun to the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Ant software build automation tool was developed as a side-effect of the creation of Tomcat as an open source project.
Davidson had initially hoped that the project would become open sourced and, since many open source projects had O'Reilly books associated with them featuring an animal on the cover, he wanted to name the project after an animal. He came up with Tomcat since he reasoned the animal represented something that could fend for itself. Although the tomcat was already in use for another O'Reilly title, his wish to see an animal cover eventually came true when O'Reilly published their Tomcat book with a snow leopard on the cover.
Read more about this topic: Apache Tomcat
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