I have something that must be a pretty standard J2EE application
server environment: I am running (at least) three Tomcat instances
sharing a common Catalina home with mod_jk load balancer in front. I
have not set up clustering, because my GWT-based applications maintain
state information client-side and do not utilize server-side J2EE Web
Application context sessions.
In this configuration I regularly need to deploy or re-deploy new
applications to all the Tomcat instances, and I was surprised to find
out that the support for this out-of-box was quite poor. All I could
find was Tomcat Client Deployer package, and all the documentation I
could find was the chapter four in the Tomcat user guide. I apologize
in advance if I have missed out something; prove me wrong!
Firstly, the build.xml file does not suffice for documentation for the
ant-tasks! I had to RTFS to find out the needed parameters for the
deploy task ("localWar" and "config"), and there seems to be an
ant-task "JkStatusUpdate" that is completely undocumented. It seems to
be related to Tomcat-5.5 (according to source code comments) so I have
left it alone for now.
Secondly, the example ant-script is only suitable for deploying to one
Tomcat manager instance at a time, which is a major limitation. I have
to write my own ant script for deployment to multiple manager
instances.
But this is not all - I am also going to need to integrate mod_jk
Status Worker ant tasks to my script, because I need to temporarily
disable workers while I undeploy and re-deploy applications to them.
(Otherwise the users may get unnecessary errors.) No problem here - I
can use "updateworker" task, but here is a major issue:
I am unable to find tomcat-jkstatus-ant.jar binaries anywhere!
The mod_jk binaries directory
/dist/tomcat/tomcat-connectors/jk/binaries/win32/jk-1.2.28 only has
the Apache HTTPD module available for downloading. Moreover, the ant
example uses pathelement location ../dist/tomcat-jkstatus-ant.jar
which seems incomprehensible to me.
I downloaded the source package in order to compile the jar file
myself, but it was not trivial and would have required some effort. I
resigned to googling for the package elsewhere in some unofficial
location (http://www.java2s.com/Code/Jar/STUVWXYZ/tomcat-jkstatus-ant.jar.htm).
My humble suggestions are:
1) Please document the TCD ant task parameters so that the user does
not have to resort to source code
2) Please make it easier to locate tomcat-jkstatus-ant.jar
Let me apologize again if I am on the wrong track, because you are
producing excellent software that contantly exceeds my expectations!
It is only because of this very high standard that I am giving this
feedback, because so far the support for application deployment has
not been as extensive as the rest of your software.
Best Regards,
Tero Karttunen
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