: In my general experience I have seen people deploying applications in
: Tomcat by dropping in a war or by exploding the .war file into
: webapps folder. General tomcat users are more familiar with web.xml
: than server.xml. So, this is a very useful information for that class
: of users and this info was absent.
I think you are being a little too presumptuious about the user base ...
just because people use a java app doesn't mean they understand the
internals of how a WAR or JAR file works -- nor should they.
I'm pretty knowledgable about Java. i understand WAR files, and yet: if i
were evaluating a piece of java software whose configuration instructions
suggested that i unpack the war and edit the web.xml to tell it where to
get it's configuration file from, i would refuse to use that piece of
software. that's the java equivilent of a C program suggesting that you
can specify it's config file by editing the bytes 1056 to 1311 of the
executable to be the path to your config file.
Absurd binary file editing analogies aside: even if editing web.xml is
somewhat "easy" for people to do, it's a maintence headache anytime you
want to upgrade solr. anyone who *isn't* very familiar with WAR files that
follows this tip is going to decide Solr sucks the first time they
go to upgrade because they are going to have to do it again (that's
if we're lucky and remember they did it in the first place -- more
then likely they'll forget they did it, upgrade, and everything
will just stop working and they won't know why)
Bottom line:
1) this is not about tomcat, so it doesn't belong on the tomcat wiki
page
2) this is not "configuration" so it doesn't belong on any
"configuration" based wiki page.
: they do not know the exact syntax for adding one. (I myself googled to
: figure it out, though I knew it was possible). Hence the
: documentation.
that seems to be an argument in favor of my suggestion: put a comment
about this in the acutal web.xml -- then you don't have to look it up
anywhere, it's already there.
-Hoss
