What the Heck is Tomcat?

[scrivener]

Before I begin, may I please beg that you overcome your urge to tell a Tom Cruise joke here? Really, what you were about to write wasn't going to be that funny. Thank you.

I've gotten so far as this explanation (http://tomcat.apache.org/) but I still don't know what Tomcat is or what it does.

If a web app I want to try out comes with Tomcat in the .zip file, do I just upload the entire thing and do the install? What if my webhost says it doesn't support Tomcat? Does that mean I need to find myself another app?

I understand it has something to do with Java, but that's as far as I get!

Meow?

[zztype]

It's basically web server software that can "serve" Java applets, as well as html, php and other page code.

http://www.jguru.com/faq/view.jsp?EID=265204

Apache is an HTTP (web) server written in C that can be compiled and run on many platforms. See http://www.apache.org

Java WebServer is an HTTP (web) server from Sun written in Java that also supports Servlets and JSP.

Tomcat is an open-source HTTP (web) server from the Apache Foundation, written in Java, that supports Servlets and JSP. It can also be used as a "plug-in" to native-code HTTP servers, such as Apache Web Server and IIS, to provide support for Servlets (while still serving normal HTTP requests from the primary, native-code web server). See http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat