Servlet Engine Particulars

Henri,

Useful tidbits, as always.

I wonder how server-independent these comments are:

"Most important, the server will notice when the WAR file is placed in the webapps/directory and will automatically unpack it and add it to the server without changes to the Server.xml file. Deploying a change is a simple matter of overwriting the WAR file with a new one. The server will notice again, unpack it, and reload all class files."

It seems I normally need to restart Tomcat 4.0.x to get a new WAR noticed (maybe there's a hot-deploy option I could turn on in server.xml, but if so, I don't have it enabled either in my development or deployment machine).

Also, I haven't ever tried simply overwriting a WAR with a new one (I always delete the unpacked directory and old WAR first), but I have lurked on some mailing list discussions where users were advised to delete the old WAR and webapp/directory before deploying the new WAR.

Does the servlet spec say an implementation is supposed to allow a hot deploy of a new WAR?