Fw: Upgrade your webapps easily HOW-TO (requires ant/manager app practice)

[Johannes Fiala <to...@fwd.at>]

Hi Remy,

I already implemented it for TC 4.1.24 (see info and link below), as I am 
able to build there. 
However, with TC 5.0.1 I'm unable to build due to the Commons EL issue 
outlined in another email.

As soon as I'm able to build TC 5.0.1, I'll implement it there as well.

However, I'm not especially fond of the current implementation I did with 
TC 4.1.24, because I don't know a good way to extract an attribute out of 
context.xml (which is available as an InputStream). Currently I read the 
whole file and extract the attribute then using indexOf. Do you know a 
more elegant way to get the attribute?
(I didn't figure out how the Digester works yet, and I didn't find 
extensive docs about it).

thx alot
Johannes


----- Forwarded by Johannes Fiala/Johannes Fiala on 01.05.2003 19:23 -----

"Johannes Fiala" <to...@fwd.at> 
01.05.2003 19:21
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Subject
Upgrade your webapps easily HOW-TO (requires ant/manager app practice)






Hi there,

I just created a patch for my release-switching problem, which allows to 
deploy a Context which points to a specific docBase to Tomcat. This allows 

you to have a lightweight "pointer-app" which only points to a specific 
version of your webapp (=the current version). 

Example:
Suppose you want to update your application myapp-1.0 to myapp-1.1.

The lightweight pointer-app is named myapp and starts pointing to 
myapp-1.0.
After you have deployed the new myapp-1.1 and run production-level tests 
against it, you sooner or later want to upgrade myapp to point to 
myapp-1.1. You can do that by changing the docBase parameter in 
context.xml of myapp and then redeploying myapp using the ant manager 
task.

You should already have used the manager app and ant to understand the 
howto.

More info: http://www.fwd.at/tomcat/upgrade-webapps-howto.html

Conclusio:
You can upgrade to new releases of your apps 
- easily
- safely (preventing yourself from bad surprises after deploying your WAR)
- and with a minimized downtime experience for your end users.

Enjoy!
Johannes