war/deployment details

[loester]

Hello

I've found a section on

http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.0-doc/deployer-howto.html

which i dont understand:

* The Context XML declarations will be deployed first
* Expanded web applications not referenced by Context XML declarations will then be deployed; if they have an associated .WAR file and it is newer than the expanded web application, the expanded directory will be removed and the webapp will be redeployed from the .WAR
* .WAR files will be deployed

What are Contenxt XML declarations?
What are expanded web applications?

I'm asking because I was searching if it was possible to hava a .war file inside another .war file, or somehow have a .war file depend on another .war file (upon deployment).

Could you help me or reference me to a place where I can find an answer?

 

[Rhoon]

Q: What are Context XML declarations?

A: web.xml, struts-config.xml, tells Tomcat how everything is linked together and what dependancies are defined (that's my understanding of it anyway).

Q: What are expanded web applications?

A: While I'm not sure about .jar's, I know .war and .ear files are expandable. What this means is, when you 'drop' your .war file into the webapp folder of your tomcat server, the server uncompresses the files and 'unzip's the file essentially so you can see each and every file. This is instead of having just myWebApp.war file sitting there and you can't do any 'hot changes' if you're debugging.

If you're doing a .war in a .war you might want to consider switching to Jboss and deploying .ear files. I'm not sure if Tomcat supports .ear files (Enterprise Application aRchive -- again my own acronym which may not be the true acronym)

I've deployed two .war linked to a .jar which contained all my EJBs, but I let Eclipse do all the back end stuff for linking, etc so I can't tell you for sure how to do it manually. If no one here is able to answer it to you liking you may want to search the tomcat email acrchives and/or google it.

HtH

Andrew