Context: I develop two apps, one during the working hours and one for myself (evening). Both of them are to run under tomcat5. And I don’t want each evening to execute an Undeploy for ProjWork and enable the deploy ProjExtra, and in the morning do it reverse (enable deploy for ProjWork and disable ProjExtra).
Problem: Now I dev for ProjWork. I start the server, open the browser and start to browse my webapp. In eclipse, I realize that I have some code problems (aka bugs), and I make the changes. Sometimes, when I make some big changes (static fields, initialization) the hotcode redeployment fails and then I have to stop tomcat. Or if I change some constants in the MultiLanguage files (Struts), I have to stop tomcat so that it reloads the data…
… and then I have to start tomcat… which again loads the ProjWork and also ProjExtra. :((
There could be several solutions for this problem:
1) Allow to register several servers (e.g. more than one instance of Tomcat5).
2) Develop a mechanism to allow me to define a configuration in which my web app will run. For example, the way WSAD works (you define a server instance and then you deploy the application in the specified server instance).
Extra: What I have described is a simple case. But what if I am working on two different applications and:
app1) : uses https and some special configs that go in the server.xml (tomcat)
app2) : a complicated app that also affects the server.xml (dunno what, some special DataSources, JNDI resources and who knows what else).
In this case having two different tomcat installations would help me develop those two applications without having to change the server.xml file each time I switch to develop the other app. Sugestions?
Thanks,
Alex