i am trying my hands on tomcat6 and while reading the book i came across the concept of "virtual hosts" ... can someone help me understand this term in more detail ?? thanks .

May be this will help:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/vhosts/

Lets say you have a webserver running. To access it, you use http://hostname:port/

In case you wish the server to be accessed using 2 different hostnames.. then we need to add another DNS name for the new host name Eg:
192.168.1.34 secondhostname

With this change, you will be able to access the app running on web server using the new hostname http://secondhostname:port/

The real problem is when you want a different app to be running when you access the webserver with different host names

http://hostname/ should display app1
http://secondhostname/ should display app2

With traditional approach, this will not work. For this most of the webservers provide options to add virtualhosts and specify what needs to be run on each virtualhost.

Hope that helps

-eNJay

thanks !!
i got the point.