My question may be covered by the Tomcat documentation and I am just confused by all the new terminology. I have spent hours in reading and still I am looking to an answer.
We wish to have a class running on Tomcat that contains system wide info and multiple database connections into DB2 on the mainframe. All other apps runing on Tomcat will open an instance of this class to access the static info and one of five open connections. Opening and closing database connections is very slow and we wish to leave open the connections and just reuse them as needed. We wrote the class and it runs ok. Yet to get it to run with an app, we need to load the class jar file into the app and references in context.xml and web.xml as listed in the documentation. But that defeats the purpose of the global app because then there are multiple instances of the class. We tried to insert a reference in <GlobalNamingResources> of server.xml. It doesn't seem to work for us. Or are we off base with this design? Is app to app communication allowed? Can I call a class from one app to another without first loading the called class into the calling class? I am using NetBeans IDE 7.1.1, Apache Tomcat 7.0.22 and Java 6.23 (build 1.6.0_23-b05). Java 7 is not an option in our shop yet because we are supporting a commercial package that breaks when run under Java 7. I would appreciate if the group could point me to the correct documentation to do what we are looking for, and perhaps a translation of the Tomcat specific terminology and jargon. Thanks Joe