Reading of attributes out of context.xml

[Johannes Fiala <to...@fwd.at>]

Hi there,

1.) Is there any easy function available to load the contents of the 
context.xml configuration file and parse out a specific attribute?
This would allow to read an attribute which is not in the Context class 
and added as an enhancement to Tomcat 4.1.24.

2.) another related question:
How does the Digester work? Line 375-400 of StandardHostDeployer.java seem 
to be real magic to me, as the push to the Digester of the current object 
reference seems to actually deploy a WAR file.
I can't figure out how this works and why it is done like that! Can 
anybody shed some light here?

thx
Johannes