-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I've been deploying webapps with Tomcat since 1997, so you'd think I should know what I'm doing by now...
But I find I don't. I'm increasingly trying to package my webapps so that they can be 'just dropped in' without any skill or knowledge being needed by the site administrator to get them set up and deployed, and this has raised two problems with relation to persistent workspace. If a preconfigured war file is installed into Tomcat using the manager webapp, it doesn't get unpacked, and in many ways that's a good thing. But I have up till now used sub-directories of the webapp root directory to store persistent data, for example cached pages and uploaded files. More particularly, I've been using the presence of a file 'WEB-INF/hymen.txt' as a marker that this webapp has never been accessed before and needs final initialisation, and had any servlet redirect to a special servlet which handled final setup if that file exists. Obviously, the final setup servlet then removed the marker file. Clearly neither of these things work if the webapp is delivered as a war file. Generally my webapps talk to databases (usually SQL databases, but could be LDAP, or other things) so it should be possible to replace the 'hymen.txt' mechanism with a simple database call which will succeed if the database has been initialised but fail if it hasn't. However this doesn't solve the problem of where to put caches and upload directories, and I can't find anything in the Servlet API which helps with this. I really don't want to be storing large lumps of arbitrary data into the database. Is there any mechanism in the Servlet spec which allows me either (i) to request that my war file should be unpacked when it is deployed, or else (ii) to get hold of some persistent filespace that my webapp can write to? Cheers Simon - -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/ ;; Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, ;; lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, ;; garbage, slime pits, and debris. -- Edward Abbey -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBQKoM4nr1UrYJMbiJAQHbngP/SGMuawDkFhjStVUZUka8wjhPy+0yM+k/ Fm6v8niMFNyxGLvRhBkQEt7Wd8ZLrfIMKmssIiivuHZkf0ErYyc/hfRBmizG8xCG j3fc2KtvoRp1L2+sH+UyfJwW8lWQHDNFF+kc9MXTXKfs3nTFMBUtvjmVx6tI6fYe fOc3H1eikjE= =lAMw -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
