Recompiling jsp; Problems with "Access Denied" errors after I edit a file in a webapp; Admin app

["Karr, David" <da...@wamu.net>]

I've been away from Tomcat for a while, and just tried setting up 5.5.9
on WinXP, with JDK1.5.0_2.  It's working reasonably well, but I'm having
some issues.

First of all, what is the "admin app"?  It's obviously different from
"manager", but I can't find any information about it.  When I try to
execute it, it says I must download and install the "admin package".  I
found a reference in tomcat-user to the "Admin tool" which shows how you
install it once you get the installer, but nothing about where to get
the installer, or even what the admin app does.

After I installed Tomcat, I deployed an app through the Manager app,
from a directory and context, not uploading a WAR.  It confused me later
when I tried changing one of the JSP files in the directory, and it
wouldn't get recompiled.  I later realized that deploying from a
directory actually copies the tree from that directory into the
"webapps" directory inside the Tomcat distribution.  Is it feasible to
have the actual webapp location be outside of the Tomcat distribution?
This is more realistic in a development situation.

The most bizarre thing is that I've twice tried to edit files in the
Tomcat distribution, being the "conf/web.xml" and then later the JSP
file for my application stored in the "webapp" directory, and that seems
to cause Tomcat to fail with "Access denied" errors on the files that I
edited.  After I change the file, I've made sure my reference to the
file was closed, from the editor I was using.  I even tried restarting
the box, and surprisingly, that had no effect.  It still got "Access
Denied" errors.  The only thing I could do was undeploy the app (in the
case of the the JSP file) and redeploy it, or in the case of the
"conf/web.xml", I had to completely uninstall Tomcat and reinstall it.

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