?? Root Context Needed w/TC 1.4.24 ??

[Tony LaPaso <tl...@attbi.com>]

Hi all,

I posted this question to teh Tomcat Users list but no one seemed to know
the answer so I was hoping someone from Tomcat Developers knew the answer.
Thanks...

I just installed TC v4.1.24 on Win 2k. The installation worked right out of
the box. I didn't have to make any changes to the server.xml. TC is up and
running just fine but I'm seeing something strange I was hoping someone
could explain:


Here's a quote from the TC documentation: "...you MUST define a Context with
a context path equal to a zero-length string. This Context becomes the
default web application for this virtual host, and is used to process all
requests that do not match any other Context's context path."

Okay, that's fine, but when I look at conf/server.xml I see this:

<!-- Tomcat Root Context -->
<!--
    <Context path="" docBase="ROOT" debug="0"/>
-->


Why is this commented out? According to the documentation cited above there
must be a "context path equal to a zero-length string". The quote I cited
seems to contradict what I'm seeing in server.xml.

As I said, even though this is commented out everything seems to work fine.
In other words, if I browse to "localhost:8080" TC does indeed serve up
webapps/ROOT/index.jsp. Is the docBase named "ROOT" the default? If so, then
the documentation seems out of date. I believe in past versions of TC it was
definitely necessary to have a "context path equal to a zero-length string".

If anybody knows (for sure), I would really appreciate an explanation.

Thanks very much,

Tony



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