Context Path

["Antonio W. Lagnada" <an...@lagnada.com>]

Hi Everyone,

Is there an assumption or some unwritten rule on what the context path
should be when deploying a web application in Tomcat (or any other standard
J2EE Web Server)?

Should an application context like this be allowed?

   # Context 1
   context = "/myapp/app1"

   # Context 2
   context = "/myapp/app2"

I double checked the current Servlet Specification (2.4) and the document
was not very specific on what the rules are on the context path.  All it
noted was that the web application context path must be unique.

We have a lead architect that insists on deploying applications this way.
The problems where running into now is that the Tomcat deployer (/manager)
app fails to deploy the second application that has a similar appcontext
pattern (/myapp).  It's probably obvious to most of you why.

Deploy app1.war to context /myapp/app1 (using /manager)  ---> SUCCESS
Deploy app2.war to context /myapp/app2 (using /manager)  ----> FAILED

The only issue I see with this is that when Tomcat extracts the contents to
${catalina.home}/webapps directory it super imposes the /myapp/app1
directory when deploying /myapp/app2.

Anyways, you're worthy insights will be appreciated.