[robbie@realise.com]

When redeploying a WAR file, the original webapp directory isn’t deleted. This means that Tomcat doesn’t attempt to unpack the WAR file when it’s restarted. I would have expected the redeployment process to delete the web-app as well as copying the WAR fille across.

Also, redeploying a WAR isn’t very intuitive – you have to do it from the “Add/Remove Project Deployments” page. It would be nice to have a “Redeploy Webapp” option on the MyEclipse context menu.

Details of my configuration are below.

Robbie

What operating system and version are you running?
– Windows 2000 Pro

What Eclipse version and build id are you using?
– 3.0

What MyEclipse version are you using?
– 3.8.1

What JDK version are you using to run Eclipse? (java -version)
– 1.4.2

What JDK version are you using to launch your application server?
– 1.4.2

What steps did you take that resulted in the issue?
– Re-deployed WAR.

What application server are you using?
– Tomcat 4.

[Scott Anderson]

Robbie,

What you’re seeing is a problem in Tomcat 4’s auto-deployment tooling that was fixed in Tomcat 5. Basically, Tomcat 4 isn’t very good at detecting redeployments of packaged archives. There are two ways to work around the problem. One is to switch to Tomcat 5 for development and the other is to use exploded deployment instead of packaged. Either of these will address the issue you’re seeing. By the way, changing to Tomcat 5 will endable source-level JSP debugging to function also.

[robbie@realise.com]

Scott –

Thanks for the response. However, I don’t believe it really addresses the issue.

Tomcat 4 is an app server supported by MyEclipse and so I would have expected MyEclipse to fully work with Tomcat 4. The only thing wrong with the current functionality is that the deployment process doesn’t delete the context before re-deploying the WAR file.

Moving to Tomcat 5 is not an option for me as I work for a company developing and supporting apps running in live Tomcat 4 environments. I’m sure I’m not unusual in this and I suspect there must be many other developers out there who are still working with Tomcat 4.

For the time being, then, I guess the best option would be to use exploded deployment up until the stage when an app is ready to be deployed. Either that or use Ant to do my local WAR deployments.

Robbie

[Scott Anderson]

Robbie,

Exploded deployment is really the best option for development in all respects anyways, since it constantly syncs your changes to your deployed project, thus eliminating full context restarts for most changes (ie. JSP mods, etc). The problem with deleting the exploded directory is tracking whether it is a valid exploded deployment from MyEclipse or simply a temp directory created by Tomcat for a packaged deployment. They’re indistinguishable.

[Author]

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