1. When using multiple Tomcats, e.g. with CATALINA_BASE, etc, does one always need separate 'work' directories? * With a huge web app with 1000's of JSPs, it is a bit obnoxious to have 'n' copies of all of this. Yes, I could pre-populate this via precompilation and copying, but this still consumes a lot of disk. * If I could share one 'work' directory across all instances, would I then have to disable all further JSP compilation to avoid multi-process race conditions, or is this all handled? 2. Are there any guides out there on how to do this sort of embedding? * I'm pretty familiar with server.xml, web.xml, etc, etc, and the CATALINA_BASE approach with a full deployment seems simple enough -- but I'm unsure what I well known/documented alternatives I might be missing.
One note on CATALINA_BASE:
Without a $CATALINA_BASEE/webapps directory any <Context> XML files
defining web apps in conf/** seem to be silently ignored. I don't
have anything I want to place in the webapps directory, though. This may be a side-effect of me continuing to use the out-of-the-box
server.xml to this point, which references 'webapps', but it took me
some time to discover.
Related note on 5.5.x and <Context> bearing .xml files:
These now have to have the same name as the web app (at least in 5.5.3), whereas one used to be able to name them anything at all and just change the web app name in the <Context> element. Not a big deal, but a surprising change. [I actually ended up using jconsole to visually diff between a working Tomcat instance of an older version and 5.5.3.]
-- Jess Holle