SSL, Secured Socket Layer, has become a vital part of production systems. It provides a safe and secure way of transmitting data from one system to another over using an encrypted connection and has become the standard for secure web tranmissions. Since both iPlanet and Tomcat support SSL connections you may wonder which should handle the them. In most cases it is best of iPlanet to handle them for a couple of reasons. First, iPlanet offers a very easy way to manage the certificates and keys needed to use SSL. Second, iPlanet can integrate with various SSL acceleration hardware if you have it available. Lastly, if by have iPlanet handle the SSL you can secure pages that are outside of Tomcat's scope. Since it is unlikely that you will have have a truly hetrogenous web enviornment you may have other non-Tomcat applications which require access to a SSL enable server like iPlanet.

setting it up