ANN: 'cats' to aid multiple tomcat instances management

[Rafal Jato <ra...@gmail.com>]

Hi all. At our company, Jato Consulting GmbH, we use tomcat heavily for
pretty much all our deployments, and also internally, in testing /
integration environments. As we wanted to run multiple instances on the
same machine, and we didn't find any existing tool that would suit our
needs , we wrote a couple of Bash scripts that help us do just that, and
automate creation / deletion and invoking them. Some of us also use it for
development as well, and it is working great.
Technically, it is a few scripts that use the facts that $CATALINA_BASE may
be different from $CATALINA_HOME and so there may be multiple tomcats
running together. We delegate to catalina.sh for actual tomcat interaction.
As with a lot of 'dirty helper scripts', these evolved into a standalone
project that we wanted to easily install on new machines, hence it got
generalized and moved to a dedicated (mercurial) repository. After some
time of using it, we decided to Open Source it (as the first of more
internal projects that we can share), as we think others might profit from
it as well.
The repository is hosted on bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/jato/cats, it
is a mercurial repository. The project is released under the Apache LIcense
2.0, just as tomcat is. There is an overview page with installation
instructions and documentation on the usage.
We don't expect this to be error-free, so when you use it, like it, and
want to help make it better, all comments and improvements are appreciated
of course.

Regards,
rafal