Is Tomcat middleware?

Question

So I have a client that needs to be running tomcat for various things (Solr and a webservice as well) and after having a meeting with him and another programmer on the project, I got a little confused. The other programmer was throwing around buzzwords and saying things like "We need to have middleware for tomcat." In response to this, my client asks me to look for middleware for tomcat which confused me because I thought that writing a webservice would be specific to the project at hand and so the "middleware" would be developed by us. If this is the case, why not just say "Web service"?

My question is this: Is there an open source servlet or plug-in for tomcat that makes it middleware (maybe something from apache's site?) or does it make sense that I should be writing my own middleware for tomcat? Or... is tomcat considered middleware? I am a total n00b when it comes to Java and tomcat, but I have a lot of experience with C#, so I'm trying to figure out how this relates to C#. I have never used the term "middleware" before and I'm pretty sure "webservice" is pretty much the same thing.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

All of these answers are too verbose. Yes, Tomcat is middleware. it sits between the HTML/Javascript layer on the client's browser and the database layer on your server. It's not as full featured as a J2EE server but it's still "middleware" as far as the generally accepted buzzword-term goes.