going from JServ to tomcat

[Eric Princen <er...@bizblast.com>]

OK, I'm sure this gets asked all the time. I have not found an archive,
so I'm going to ask it again. Sorry for the repetition.

I'm making the move from JServ to tomcat. I created my tomcat.conf file,
and it is included in my httpd.conf file. I can run the demo servlets
and jsps fine. No problem there. Everything starts up perfectly and runs
in it's default mode.

The problem comes in where I have my own servlet zones. There used to be
a jserv.properties file that said where the servlet zone property files
are. I made a tomcat.properties file and pointed to it in tomcat.conf.
It does not appear that tomcat wants to do things this way. I get no
errors, but I also don't get my servlet zones. I have not found any
documentation that talks about this, and as I said before, I'm sure it's
a fairly common problem. I have found little documentation on
configuring tomcat. Am I looking in the wrong places? I'm a pretty
bright guy, or at least that's what I'm told. I must be missing a
crucial piece of information.

-Eric ;-)

--
Eric Princen
Chief Technology Officer
BizBlast.com

Re: going from JServ to tomcat

["Craig R. McClanahan" <Cr...@eng.sun.com>]

Eric Princen wrote:

> OK, I'm sure this gets asked all the time. I have not found an archive,
> so I'm going to ask it again. Sorry for the repetition.
>

It won't help you now, but I'm going to be giving a session at ApacheCon
Europe in October on precisely this -- what do you need to know, and do, to
port a JServ application to Tomcat.  (I'll definitely make sure the info is
available to Tomcat users from the Jakarta web site as well.)

>
> I'm making the move from JServ to tomcat. I created my tomcat.conf file,
> and it is included in my httpd.conf file. I can run the demo servlets
> and jsps fine. No problem there. Everything starts up perfectly and runs
> in it's default mode.
>
> The problem comes in where I have my own servlet zones. There used to be
> a jserv.properties file that said where the servlet zone property files
> are. I made a tomcat.properties file and pointed to it in tomcat.conf.
> It does not appear that tomcat wants to do things this way. I get no
> errors, but I also don't get my servlet zones. I have not found any
> documentation that talks about this, and as I said before, I'm sure it's
> a fairly common problem. I have found little documentation on
> configuring tomcat. Am I looking in the wrong places? I'm a pretty
> bright guy, or at least that's what I'm told. I must be missing a
> crucial piece of information.
>

Anyone contemplating this migration should run, not walk, to the JavaSoft
web site and download the servlet 2.2 specification, at
<http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/download.html>.  The section on web
applications will tell you how web apps (pretty similar to zones in Apache
JServ) are configured with a "web application deployment descriptor" file.
The good news is that this configuration is now part of the spec, so it's
portable across all servlet containers that implement 2.2.

There are still server-specific details about how to deploy a web
application in a given server.  For Tomcat, that is pretty easy -- put your
application (either packed into a WAR file as described in the spec, or an
unpacked directory) into the $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps directory and it will get
recognized automatically when Tomcat starts up.  You don't have to mess with
"server.xml" unless you want to give your app some non-default
characteristics.

>
> -Eric ;-)
>

Craig McClanahan