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Posted to users@tomcat.apache.org by Kurt Overberg <ku...@hotdogrecords.com> on 2005/11/03 15:19:59 UTC
How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Hello All, I'm currently running mid-sized website (load balanced across
five servers). Its a fairly large web application with a front and a
back-end. In production, the application is sitting exploded in a
directory which tomcats point at. It looks rather like a development
sandbox. I do this because our web people need to modify the content
(JSPs) of the website on a fairly regular basis. Right now, they can
just "cvs update" the webapp directory and things work great.
However, this is a bit of a deployment nightmare. Everytime I need to
push out a new version of the core servlets, I have to manually update
each and every sandbox on each server. I would MUCH rather use a .war
file to deploy to each server and let tomcat deal with things (since the
website is really starting to grow). Is there any way to deploy a .war
file and then let people modify the JSPs in it? Complicating things is
that we use CVS for everything, and new JSPs make their way to the site
via a cvs update.
Right now, it seems like everytime someone changed a JSP, I'd have to
re-deploy the entire thing, when really its just a few JSPs that have
changed. The web guys update the site an average of 10-20 times per day.
Any suggestions? Seems like this would be a pretty common problem, but
I've found nothing on google, et al. Do I have to move to some sort of
content management system, where the servlets and JSPs remain static and
the data comes from a DB?
Thanks for any help or suggestions!
/kurt
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Re: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Posted by Anthony Carlos <an...@digitalphenom.com>.
Kurt:
Have you looked into writing an Ant task to do this for you?
-Anthony
On Nov 3, 2005, at 9:19 AM, Kurt Overberg wrote:
> Hello All, I'm currently running mid-sized website (load balanced
> across five servers). Its a fairly large web application with a
> front and a back-end. In production, the application is sitting
> exploded in a directory which tomcats point at. It looks rather
> like a development sandbox. I do this because our web people need
> to modify the content (JSPs) of the website on a fairly regular
> basis. Right now, they can just "cvs update" the webapp directory
> and things work great.
>
> However, this is a bit of a deployment nightmare. Everytime I need
> to push out a new version of the core servlets, I have to manually
> update each and every sandbox on each server. I would MUCH rather
> use a .war file to deploy to each server and let tomcat deal with
> things (since the website is really starting to grow). Is there
> any way to deploy a .war file and then let people modify the JSPs
> in it? Complicating things is that we use CVS for everything, and
> new JSPs make their way to the site via a cvs update.
>
> Right now, it seems like everytime someone changed a JSP, I'd have
> to re-deploy the entire thing, when really its just a few JSPs that
> have changed. The web guys update the site an average of 10-20
> times per day.
>
> Any suggestions? Seems like this would be a pretty common problem,
> but I've found nothing on google, et al. Do I have to move to some
> sort of content management system, where the servlets and JSPs
> remain static and the data comes from a DB?
>
> Thanks for any help or suggestions!
>
> /kurt
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
>
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RE: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Posted by Richard Mixon <rn...@qwest.net>.
Kurt,
Yes, I was thinking that using rsync would still involve bulding/deploying
the war file. Here's the scenario I see:
1) Build war file, deploy to each Tomcat.
2) Developer makes changes to JSP during the day, then checks into CVS.
3) CVS can kick off a script that uses rsync/scp to update contexts on each
Tomcat.
4) When things really change (e.g. servlet or other Java classes), you build
a new war file and re-deploy.
The CVS "loginfo" file allows you to specify a script to run when certain
things are checked in. The script can kick off the rsync/scp if a ".jsp"
file is checked in.
With our situation we just have two servers and only rarely change the JSP
files during the day. I just update the context for one Tomcat server,
switch over to the other and use rsync to get the changes.
Also, if you use the clustering/replication features of Tomcat 5.5.x there
is something called the "farm deployer" that might help deploy across
multiple Tomcat servers by doing a single deploy operation. Check the 5.5
doc on clustering.
Hope that's a bit clearer - Richard
-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Overberg [mailto:kurt@hotdogrecords.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 9:53 AM
To: Tomcat Users List
Subject: Re: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Richard,
Thanks for the reply! Regarding your idea of using rsync- does that still
involve building a .war file? I'm pretty ignorant of how 'real sites' do
this, and of the whole deploy mechanism in general. I mean, how do people
manage 100's of tomcats? I'm trying to get my system to the point where I
can just deploy a new tomcat node to a new server without much hassle, and
manage from a central console. I have thought about using rsync, but I
guess the thought of running things from a file structure (and not a war)
just feels...I dunno... 'amatuerish'. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
My shell-fu is much better than my java-fu, so I can figure it out that way,
I guess I just assumed there's some big, complex apache project for managing
large numbers of tomcats remotely.
Thanks again!
/kurt
Richard Mixon wrote:
> Kurt,
>
> Just using a ".war" file to deploy from should not keep you from
> updating the JSP pages. We do occasional patches to our JSP pages in a
> two-server cluster with no problem.
>
> However if you pre-compile the JSP pages before building the ".war"
> file that could pose an issue.
>
> Using CVS as a replication utility to install modified JSP's to each
> Tomcat's webapp directory is pretty innovative - but I wonder if it
> does not also present some problems. For one, I've never seen a WAR
> file build that has the entire CVS "checkout" directory structure in
> it - i.e. the hardcoded "CVS" subdirectory and its associated files
> that are placed in each directory of the checked-out CVS module. That
> does not mean it will not work, it probably should. In fact if you are
> going to do updates from CVS you would need to be sure those CVS
directories were in the ".war" file.
>
> It might be a good idea to use an rsync (on Linux/Unix ?) script or
> something similar instead of CVS to replicate the updates.
>
> Hope this helps - Richard
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Overberg [mailto:kurt@hotdogrecords.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 7:20 AM
> To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
> Subject: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
>
> Hello All, I'm currently running mid-sized website (load balanced
> across five servers). Its a fairly large web application with a front
> and a back-end. In production, the application is sitting exploded in
> a directory which tomcats point at. It looks rather like a
> development sandbox. I do this because our web people need to modify
> the content
> (JSPs) of the website on a fairly regular basis. Right now, they can
> just "cvs update" the webapp directory and things work great.
>
> However, this is a bit of a deployment nightmare. Everytime I need to
> push out a new version of the core servlets, I have to manually update
> each and every sandbox on each server. I would MUCH rather use a .war
> file to deploy to each server and let tomcat deal with things (since
> the website is really starting to grow). Is there any way to deploy a
> .war file and then let people modify the JSPs in it? Complicating
> things is that we use CVS for everything, and new JSPs make their way to
the site via a cvs update.
>
> Right now, it seems like everytime someone changed a JSP, I'd have to
> re-deploy the entire thing, when really its just a few JSPs that have
> changed. The web guys update the site an average of 10-20 times per day.
>
> Any suggestions? Seems like this would be a pretty common problem,
> but I've found nothing on google, et al. Do I have to move to some
> sort of content management system, where the servlets and JSPs remain
> static and the data comes from a DB?
>
> Thanks for any help or suggestions!
>
> /kurt
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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RE: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Posted by Richard Mixon <rn...@qwest.net>.
Kurt,
Yes, I was thinking that using rsync would still involve bulding/deploying
the war file. Here's the scenario I see:
1) Build war file, deploy to each Tomcat.
2) Developer makes changes to JSP during the day, then checks into CVS.
3) CVS can kick off a script that uses rsync/scp to update contexts on each
Tomcat.
4) When things really change (e.g. servlet or other Java classes), you build
a new war file and re-deploy.
The CVS "loginfo" file allows you to specify a script to run when certain
things are checked in. The script can kick off the rsync/scp if a ".jsp"
file is checked in.
With our situation we just have two servers and only rarely change the JSP
files during the day. I just update the context for one Tomcat server,
switch over to the other and use rsync to get the changes.
Also, if you use the clustering/replication features of Tomcat 5.5.x there
is something called the "farm deployer" that might help deploy across
multiple Tomcat servers by doing a single deploy operation. Check the 5.5
doc on clustering.
Hope that's a bit clearer - Richard
-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Overberg [mailto:kurt@hotdogrecords.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 9:53 AM
To: Tomcat Users List
Subject: Re: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Richard,
Thanks for the reply! Regarding your idea of using rsync- does that still
involve building a .war file? I'm pretty ignorant of how 'real sites' do
this, and of the whole deploy mechanism in general. I mean, how do people
manage 100's of tomcats? I'm trying to get my system to the point where I
can just deploy a new tomcat node to a new server without much hassle, and
manage from a central console. I have thought about using rsync, but I
guess the thought of running things from a file structure (and not a war)
just feels...I dunno... 'amatuerish'. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
My shell-fu is much better than my java-fu, so I can figure it out that way,
I guess I just assumed there's some big, complex apache project for managing
large numbers of tomcats remotely.
Thanks again!
/kurt
Richard Mixon wrote:
> Kurt,
>
> Just using a ".war" file to deploy from should not keep you from
> updating the JSP pages. We do occasional patches to our JSP pages in a
> two-server cluster with no problem.
>
> However if you pre-compile the JSP pages before building the ".war"
> file that could pose an issue.
>
> Using CVS as a replication utility to install modified JSP's to each
> Tomcat's webapp directory is pretty innovative - but I wonder if it
> does not also present some problems. For one, I've never seen a WAR
> file build that has the entire CVS "checkout" directory structure in
> it - i.e. the hardcoded "CVS" subdirectory and its associated files
> that are placed in each directory of the checked-out CVS module. That
> does not mean it will not work, it probably should. In fact if you are
> going to do updates from CVS you would need to be sure those CVS
directories were in the ".war" file.
>
> It might be a good idea to use an rsync (on Linux/Unix ?) script or
> something similar instead of CVS to replicate the updates.
>
> Hope this helps - Richard
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Overberg [mailto:kurt@hotdogrecords.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 7:20 AM
> To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
> Subject: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
>
> Hello All, I'm currently running mid-sized website (load balanced
> across five servers). Its a fairly large web application with a front
> and a back-end. In production, the application is sitting exploded in
> a directory which tomcats point at. It looks rather like a
> development sandbox. I do this because our web people need to modify
> the content
> (JSPs) of the website on a fairly regular basis. Right now, they can
> just "cvs update" the webapp directory and things work great.
>
> However, this is a bit of a deployment nightmare. Everytime I need to
> push out a new version of the core servlets, I have to manually update
> each and every sandbox on each server. I would MUCH rather use a .war
> file to deploy to each server and let tomcat deal with things (since
> the website is really starting to grow). Is there any way to deploy a
> .war file and then let people modify the JSPs in it? Complicating
> things is that we use CVS for everything, and new JSPs make their way to
the site via a cvs update.
>
> Right now, it seems like everytime someone changed a JSP, I'd have to
> re-deploy the entire thing, when really its just a few JSPs that have
> changed. The web guys update the site an average of 10-20 times per day.
>
> Any suggestions? Seems like this would be a pretty common problem,
> but I've found nothing on google, et al. Do I have to move to some
> sort of content management system, where the servlets and JSPs remain
> static and the data comes from a DB?
>
> Thanks for any help or suggestions!
>
> /kurt
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
Re: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Posted by Kurt Overberg <ku...@hotdogrecords.com>.
Richard,
Thanks for the reply! Regarding your idea of using rsync- does that
still involve building a .war file? I'm pretty ignorant of how 'real
sites' do this, and of the whole deploy mechanism in general. I mean,
how do people manage 100's of tomcats? I'm trying to get my system to
the point where I can just deploy a new tomcat node to a new server
without much hassle, and manage from a central console. I have thought
about using rsync, but I guess the thought of running things from a file
structure (and not a war) just feels...I dunno... 'amatuerish'. Maybe
I'm just paranoid.
My shell-fu is much better than my java-fu, so I can figure it out that
way, I guess I just assumed there's some big, complex apache project for
managing large numbers of tomcats remotely.
Thanks again!
/kurt
Richard Mixon wrote:
> Kurt,
>
> Just using a ".war" file to deploy from should not keep you from updating
> the JSP pages. We do occasional patches to our JSP pages in a two-server
> cluster with no problem.
>
> However if you pre-compile the JSP pages before building the ".war" file
> that could pose an issue.
>
> Using CVS as a replication utility to install modified JSP's to each
> Tomcat's webapp directory is pretty innovative - but I wonder if it does not
> also present some problems. For one, I've never seen a WAR file build that
> has the entire CVS "checkout" directory structure in it - i.e. the hardcoded
> "CVS" subdirectory and its associated files that are placed in each
> directory of the checked-out CVS module. That does not mean it will not
> work, it probably should. In fact if you are going to do updates from CVS
> you would need to be sure those CVS directories were in the ".war" file.
>
> It might be a good idea to use an rsync (on Linux/Unix ?) script or
> something similar instead of CVS to replicate the updates.
>
> Hope this helps - Richard
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Overberg [mailto:kurt@hotdogrecords.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 7:20 AM
> To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
> Subject: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
>
> Hello All, I'm currently running mid-sized website (load balanced across
> five servers). Its a fairly large web application with a front and a
> back-end. In production, the application is sitting exploded in a directory
> which tomcats point at. It looks rather like a development sandbox. I do
> this because our web people need to modify the content
> (JSPs) of the website on a fairly regular basis. Right now, they can just
> "cvs update" the webapp directory and things work great.
>
> However, this is a bit of a deployment nightmare. Everytime I need to push
> out a new version of the core servlets, I have to manually update each and
> every sandbox on each server. I would MUCH rather use a .war file to deploy
> to each server and let tomcat deal with things (since the website is really
> starting to grow). Is there any way to deploy a .war file and then let
> people modify the JSPs in it? Complicating things is that we use CVS for
> everything, and new JSPs make their way to the site via a cvs update.
>
> Right now, it seems like everytime someone changed a JSP, I'd have to
> re-deploy the entire thing, when really its just a few JSPs that have
> changed. The web guys update the site an average of 10-20 times per day.
>
> Any suggestions? Seems like this would be a pretty common problem, but I've
> found nothing on google, et al. Do I have to move to some sort of content
> management system, where the servlets and JSPs remain static and the data
> comes from a DB?
>
> Thanks for any help or suggestions!
>
> /kurt
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@tomcat.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@tomcat.apache.org
RE: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Posted by Richard Mixon <rn...@qwest.net>.
Kurt,
Just using a ".war" file to deploy from should not keep you from updating
the JSP pages. We do occasional patches to our JSP pages in a two-server
cluster with no problem.
However if you pre-compile the JSP pages before building the ".war" file
that could pose an issue.
Using CVS as a replication utility to install modified JSP's to each
Tomcat's webapp directory is pretty innovative - but I wonder if it does not
also present some problems. For one, I've never seen a WAR file build that
has the entire CVS "checkout" directory structure in it - i.e. the hardcoded
"CVS" subdirectory and its associated files that are placed in each
directory of the checked-out CVS module. That does not mean it will not
work, it probably should. In fact if you are going to do updates from CVS
you would need to be sure those CVS directories were in the ".war" file.
It might be a good idea to use an rsync (on Linux/Unix ?) script or
something similar instead of CVS to replicate the updates.
Hope this helps - Richard
-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Overberg [mailto:kurt@hotdogrecords.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 7:20 AM
To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: How to deploy when JSPs need to change regularly?
Hello All, I'm currently running mid-sized website (load balanced across
five servers). Its a fairly large web application with a front and a
back-end. In production, the application is sitting exploded in a directory
which tomcats point at. It looks rather like a development sandbox. I do
this because our web people need to modify the content
(JSPs) of the website on a fairly regular basis. Right now, they can just
"cvs update" the webapp directory and things work great.
However, this is a bit of a deployment nightmare. Everytime I need to push
out a new version of the core servlets, I have to manually update each and
every sandbox on each server. I would MUCH rather use a .war file to deploy
to each server and let tomcat deal with things (since the website is really
starting to grow). Is there any way to deploy a .war file and then let
people modify the JSPs in it? Complicating things is that we use CVS for
everything, and new JSPs make their way to the site via a cvs update.
Right now, it seems like everytime someone changed a JSP, I'd have to
re-deploy the entire thing, when really its just a few JSPs that have
changed. The web guys update the site an average of 10-20 times per day.
Any suggestions? Seems like this would be a pretty common problem, but I've
found nothing on google, et al. Do I have to move to some sort of content
management system, where the servlets and JSPs remain static and the data
comes from a DB?
Thanks for any help or suggestions!
/kurt
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