Tomcat classpath and servlets outside of WEB-INF

[Jim]

Hi,
Does anybody know if it is possible to execute servlets outside the
WEB-INF directory? Somebody at work thinks that setting the classpath
would help. But I have had no luck so far. I'm currently on a
Win2000 box running Apache, Tomcat 4.1.18, j2sdk 1.4.2. And I found
out (to my dismay) that symbolic linking doesn't work with Windows. I
don't even know if symbolic linking would work if it was a linux box.
People at work say that Tomcat has worked and it was executing
servlets outside the WEB-INF directory. They are very sure on this
point. But it broke, and they decided to deleted the entire
installation (conf file and all). And the person who got it to work
is no longer here. So I'm at square one. Jserv had been running the
servlets, but the company wants to move forward. The servlets had
been mapped to Jserv through the classpath.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Jim

 

[Christophe Vanfleteren]

Hi,
Does anybody know if it is possible to execute servlets outside the
WEB-INF directory? Somebody at work thinks that setting the classpath
would help. But I have had no luck so far. I'm currently on a
Win2000 box running Apache, Tomcat 4.1.18, j2sdk 1.4.2. And I found
out (to my dismay) that symbolic linking doesn't work with Windows. I
don't even know if symbolic linking would work if it was a linux box.
People at work say that Tomcat has worked and it was executing
servlets outside the WEB-INF directory. They are very sure on this
point. But it broke, and they decided to deleted the entire
installation (conf file and all). And the person who got it to work
is no longer here. So I'm at square one. Jserv had been running the
servlets, but the company wants to move forward. The servlets had
been mapped to Jserv through the classpath.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Jim

Newer versions of tomcat now ship with symbolic links in webapps disabled.
you should check the config file (don't know the exact key , but it should
be possible to re-enable it.

 

[Jim]

(e-mail address removed) (Jim) said:

It might work with CLASSPATH tricks, but why do you need this?

If you told what is the problem you're trying to solve with this, perhaps
someone would be able to propose some solution to the actual problem.

The project I'm interning on has been around for several years. They
have a directory structure like so:

C:\Main_App_dir\Minor_App\Directories_of_classes
C:\Main_App_dir\Supporting_App\...\Dir_with_classes
C:\Main_App_dir\Other_Supporting_App\...\Dir_with_classes

The project had been using JServ to run the servlets by passing the
Classpaths through a file to JServ. And I can't change the directory
structure because class A in
C:\Main_App_dir\Supporting_App\...\Dir_with_classes calls class B in
C:\Main_App_dir\Other_Supporting_App\...\Dir_with_classes.

Now the project leaders want to move to Tomcat. Any suggestions? Is
there a source code example of a webappclassloader that can be forced
to load from any directory?

Jim