There's nothing like an Apache product name to raise an eyebrow - the Apache volunteers have a knack for turning out oddly named technologies that's only rivaled by Ubuntu's "adjective-animal" naming format.
The name "Catalina," according to Craig McClanahan, who designed the original architecture of the servlet container, can be attributed to three things: his love for Catalina Island (despite never having visited it), his cat's habit of hanging around the computer while he was writing the code, and the consideration, at an early stage of development, of building Tomcat on a server framework called Avalon, which is the name of a town on Catalina island.
The Avalon framework was eventually abandoned, but the name stuck, and the rest is history.
