This is similar to how we do it in production as well.
In development, we have all our classes un-jarred under the path for the servlet zone (obviously 3rd party classes are not un-jarred), so that the development JServ picks up our changes automagically. We do not ever need to stop or start our development apache or JServ (with obvious exceptions, which are relatively rare for us). Since development code can be fairly dynamic at times, this works well for us (small development team).
Then for production, we jar everything up, including the servlets. In production, we do not have any individual class files under our path for the servlet zone. We do this to squeak out any performance gain, however minimal, by avoiding any unnecessary checking for file changes by JServ (even though you can turn this off). I guess one might question if this even helps (does somebody know for sure either way?). I also like it because it feels "cleaner" to me for a production environment (i.e. deal with one jar file instead of multiple class files). In any case, changes to production code necessitate replacing a jar file, which means restarting JServ (through apache). One should never have to reboot for something as trivial as that. I wonder what platform the original poster is on? We are on Linux. Shouldn't make a difference, eh?
In both development and production, all servlets are aliased, which allows us to use mostly the same configuration files between dev and prod, with obvious exceptions.
- Greg
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin Macclay [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2000 12:18 PM
> To: Java Apache Users
> Subject: Re: own custom classes in servlet?
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> BEFORE YOU POST, search the faq at <http://java.apache.org/faq/>
> WHEN YOU POST, include all relevant version numbers, log files,
> and configuration files. Don't make us guess your problem!!!
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> We also use a custom package in our servlets. The way we are
> both doing it,
> the custom package classes are loaded into memory via the
> bootstrap class
> loader and so they can not be reloaded. You can just restart Apache
> (apachectl restart) which will restart JServ and the Java
> Virtual Machine,
> blowing away the custom package classes that were loaded. So
> it will then
> load in the new classes next time you load a servlet that
> uses it. It's not
> necessary to reboot your machine each time to blow away the JVM.
>
> Hope that helps,
> Kevin
