servlet and tomcat question

[ryan]

whenever i deploy a new servlet with tomcat 4.1.30 and use a web.xml file, i
find i have to do the following to view it:

1. stop and restart tomcat
2. close and open internet explorer.

anyway to skip these steps? seems like tomcat caches my servlet?

 

[Will Hartung]

whenever i deploy a new servlet with tomcat 4.1.30 and use a web.xml file, i
find i have to do the following to view it:

1. stop and restart tomcat
2. close and open internet explorer.

anyway to skip these steps? seems like tomcat caches my servlet?

It does cache the servlet. It doesn't really check for changes at that
level. Tomcat has some Ant tasks that will let you install, remove, and
reload a web app in the running container. You can also use URLs to the
Manger App, and maybe the Admin application. I've had problems with this
(seems to be a problem with commons logging), and just restart Tomcat, but
it may work for you.

As for IE, I dunno. Should be able to simply Refresh and have your new
changes show up once Tomcat is restarted.

Regards,

Will Hartung
([email protected])

 

[Ryan Stewart]

whenever i deploy a new servlet with tomcat 4.1.30 and use a web.xml file, i
find i have to do the following to view it:

1. stop and restart tomcat
2. close and open internet explorer.

anyway to skip these steps? seems like tomcat caches my servlet?

From http://www.moreservlets.com/Using-Tomcat-4.html:

The next step is to tell Tomcat to check the modification dates of the class
files of requested servlets and reload ones that have changed since they
were loaded into the server's memory. This degrades performance in
deployment situations, so is turned off by default. However, if you fail to
turn it on for your development server, you'll have to restart the server
every time you recompile a servlet that has already been loaded into the
server's memory.

To turn on servlet reloading, edit install_dir/conf/server.xml and add a
DefaultContext subelement to the main Service element and supply true for
the reloadable attribute. The easiest way to do this is to find the
following comment:

<!-- Define properties for each web application. This is only
needed
if you want to set non-default properties, or have web
application
document roots in places other than the virtual host's appBase
directory. -->

and insert the following line just below it:

<DefaultContext reloadable="true"/>

Be sure to make a backup copy of server.xml before making the above change.