> Deploy a ROOT web application whose 404 page says "Down for > maintenance". You could even customize this kind of thing to only > respond to certain URL-prefixes (like [ROOT]/mywebapp/*). > > What will you do while Tomcat is restarting, though, if you have to > restart? > > Restarts take about a second or two, it's an acceptable downtime. Custom 404's are a good idea -- the only content I need in the directory is the 404 maintenance page itself. I can just swap the names of the actual webapp and 'maintenence' webapp directories (they're exploded).
Thanks to everyone for the other good suggestions.
