tomcatpolicyprotocol is a jakarta tomcat protocol handler that serves a Flash socket policy file which is needed when you want to establish a socket connection with Flash to your tomcat server.

When you use the http/https library for AS3 (http://github.com/gabriel/as3httpclient/tree/master) that uses sockets to use real REST services this little tomcat extension helps you to fullfill the security requirements of the new Flash players (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/socket_policy_files.html)

Configruation:
You need the latest version of Tomcat (right now version 6)
Just copy the flashsocketpolicy-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar, created by the maven build, to the tomcat lib folder.
Add the following connector to the list of connectors in the server.xml:

  <Connector protocol="flash.SocketPolicyProtocolHandler"/>

This connector now serves a default socket policy file on port 843.

Default policy file:

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
  <cross-domain-policy>
    <site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="master-only"/>
    <allow-access-from domain="localhost" to-ports="80" />
  </cross-domain-policy>  

If you want a different port you can change it like this:

  <Connector port="8111" protocol="flash.SocketPolicyProtocolHandler"/>

You can also change the default policy file by specifying the absolute path to it:

  <Connector port="8111" policyFile="/policy.xml" protocol="flash.SocketPolicyProtocolHandler"/>