Clustering and Context Container setup

[Daniel Savard <da...@gmail.com>]

Hi everyone,

I am reviewing a clustering implementation I have done and after reading
the documentation for Tomcat 8, which is the version I am using (8.0.35 +
Oracle JDK1.8.0_92) I ran into the distributable attribute.

I saw in my configuration the distributable="true" attribute is set at the
Context container definition level rather than having a <distributable/>
element in the web.xml of each web application in the cluster.

I cannot find this attribute documented in the Context container
documentation. Is it an omission or the attribute is deprecated or what?

I also saw in this documentation page:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/config/cluster.html

The Context element should specify the
className="org.apache.catalina.ha.context.ReplicatedContext" in order to
enable the Context replication.

I am wondering if distributable="true" is equivalent to setting the
className to the value above or not? If not, what is the difference? I am
asking, because I did not set the className to this value and so far, it
seems to work.

What is the proper way with Tomcat 8 to setup the Context for clustering?

I also saw the sample configuration in the Clustering HOWTO documentation (
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/cluster-howto.html) and the
Interceptor MessageDispatch15Interceptor defined in this document is
deprecated and MessageDispatchInterceptor should be used instead. Which
make me doubt if this documentation is accurate or not. I found the
deprecated class while searching for the different values for
channelSendOptions.

Here:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/api/org/apache/catalina/tribes/group/interceptors/MessageDispatch15Interceptor.html

So, a little clarification would be appreciated.

Regards,
-----------------
Daniel Savard