With regard to version 3.1 of Tomcat, what specifically must be done to enable automatic reloading of servlets?
Created May 4, 2012
Avi Kak Automatic reloading of servlets by a servlet container comes in handy
during the development phase when you are frequently modifying and
recompiling the servlets. Having to constantly shutdown and restart the
servlet container each time you modify a servlet class can become tiring
very quickly.
Automatic reloading of servlets in Tomcat 3.1 is predicated upon two entries in two different files in the directory TOMCAT_HOME/conf:
-
In the file TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml, you must set the
reloadable attribute to true in the context element
pertaining to your webapp. For example, I have a webapp named
form-processing. So I added the following entry to the file
TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml:
<Context path="/form-processing" docBase="webapps/form-processing" debug="0" reloadable="true" > </Context>
- The file TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat.properties allows you to specify a classpath that is passed on to the JVM. The servlets that you want automatically reloaded must not be in this classpath. Note that this classpath is in addition to the classpath specified in the startup file tomcat.bat in the directory TOMCAT_HOME/bin. For the simple webapp form-processing that I mentioned above, I do not need to specify any additional classpaths in the TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat.properties file.