Currently, I have tomcat installed on the production server to serve my java webapps. I develop in eclipse at my personal workstation and then I use an ant script to build the project into a war file and deploy that on the server.
This setup works well when I am on the same network as the server because deploying is almost instantaneous. However, now that I am working remotely uploading the war file to the server is slow and in most cases very redundant (there are about .5 GB of static media included in the war file).
Is there a better way to update my webapp on tomcat from eclipse and if so what are the best options for implementing such a solution with minimal effort?
Checkout rsync. It transmits just the updates to the file, so it will greatly speed up your process. Also depending on how complex your application is you might look into installing jetty on your personal workstation. It works well with eclipse and lets you check the new code almost instantaneously.
What it sounds like you want is to have the exploded war file(your root app/result of ant compile) sit in your tomcat web-apps folder. Tomcat will deploy it based on the host or context tag in server.xml.
This way, you can just drop your $app/WEB-INF/classes into the application and, if context reload is enabled, the new files will be deployed immediately.
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I started my journey into web applications about three years ago and I'm happy to say that I've finally deployed a working website. My concern is that to deploy the website I use the Eclipse IDE and a Tomcat webserver. So basically I right click the project in Eclipse and then choose "Run As > Run on Server" and then select the Tomcat server I downloaded - from that point on the console spits out some startup messages and my website is online and ready for use. What are are some of the drawbacks of deploying a project this way. I've read just briefly about WAR files and adding them to Tomcats Webapps folder but I could neither get that working nor did I understand completely the process...so is it acceptable to just deploy the project the way I have been doing thus far by running it in Eclipse?
Generally Development machine and deployment server is different.
On Deployment server one may not have eclipse always.
WAR file is just a webarchive which includes all the necessary files. WAR makes your project portable.
Export WAR from eclipse place it in tomcat webapps in any machine and restart tomcat.
You should have your webapp successfully running on that machine.
That's a fine way for deploying a server when you're learning, or always have the server (the only server!) running on your development machine.
If you need to push to a remote machine, it won't work, and you'll need to learn other methods then, but for now, what you're doing is fine.
I guess a drawback of using such an awesome IDE like eclipse is that you miss the point for what happens behind the scenes of an application. I'm a ruby developer so not a java veteran. So I've been coding a project in java and using the spring framework for IOC and MVC. Can someone explain to me what is going on when I select run on server in eclipse? Because eventually I will be deploying this masterpiece of an application to a Linux server. Here is my setup. I am using Spring MVC 3 and the maven plugin in eclipse. In the pom.xml file, I have stuff like latest spring release version, log4j, spring mvc, spring context etc.
I have been testing my application on localhost using the handy option of run on server in the eclipse IDE. The server configuration in eclipse is pointing to the tomcat directory location for where I have installed tomcat 7. Please demystify what happens behind the scenes and what I will need to do if I want to deploy this application on a production server. The more detail the better. Thanks a ton in advance.
Deploying a web application to Tomcat is as simple as this (assuming Tomcat is installed)
Bundle your application in a .war with the correct format.
Move the generated .war file to the /webapps directory of your Tomcat installation folder.
Run the /bin/startup.[sh|bat] script in the Tomcat installation folder.
Note that there are intermediate steps you can do to configure the deployment, like changing your context path. Go through the Tomcat documentation for details.
In step 3, Tomcat will extract the .war contents to a directory in the /webapps folder with the same name as your .war file. It will use this as the context path. The script itself launches a java process by putting the WEB-INF/[class|lib|...] onto the classpath along with some Tomcat libraries.
So Eclipse basically does all the steps above for you.
Ultimately you are deploying an web application that means you are deploying a war file to the server. Regardless of using frameworks like spring, struts anything.
SO a web application request starts from web.xml file. SO for spring mvc application, you are mapping all request coming from browser to DispatcherServlet and then this guy is responsible to manage whole life cycle of your application.
For more details of how MVC works please see
http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/3.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html
So in order to deploy your application (a war) on server first of all you have to create a war from your source code. You can go to traditional approach to use java given utility like using jar from command prompt or you can use ANT, GRADLE, MAVEN and such build tool that creates war for you in automated way.
Spring is not doing anything extra for you. I believe you to research a bit more on how these tools works.
Once a war is ready for you, you can simply go to tomcat UI and there you will find options to deploy your war.
I hope it helps you.
All the majic happens in two places.
The first is your 'Servers' directory in the root of your Eclipse Package Explorer. These are your server configuration files that Eclipse will use (mostly) when it creates a new server instance.
The second is in the ./metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.wst.server.core/ file system directory in your Eclipse workspace. This is where the tomcat application is actually deployed by eclipse.
The Tomcat Documentation is pretty good actually and helps explain how to do deployments. FYI, I do not know many people that use the Manager, from my experience most people deploy their applications by hand.
I have an enterprise application running on a WebLogic server.
When I modify any Java class, I have to build the .ear file and deploy to the server every time. Even for a small modification, I need to build the whole application and deploy to the server. The server is taking around 10 minutes to do this.
Is there any other way to do this?
When I was working with Tomcat, we used to update the .class files directly in the webapps project folder so that we didn't need to re-build the entire application.
Yes - there is a feature called FastSwap.
Using FastSwap to speed up dev
Using FastSwap Deployment to Minimize Redeployment
When you create a weblogic domain, you define it will be started in Development or Production mode.
To modify that, update the value of production-mode-enabled to true or false in config/config.xml
For more details check the following link or Weblogic documentation.
Difference between DEV and PROD mode in Weblogic 10.3
About your question on Weblogic Plugin, I suppose your're talking about OEPE (Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse), which will deploy your application to a running domain that will be in dev or prod mode according to the mentioned in the config.xml
I wrote a small servlet and jsp project on eclipse and tomcat 5.5, but I don't know with works I do for make that a real site on a real host. Should I war them or I should upload project on host? My host should have which properties? I really don't now how to start?
I would recommend packaging them in a war and deploying it out to the remote tomcat server. Its not a good idea to deploy an unpackaged project directly to the server unless your debugging or testing. Once you have a finished project ready to deploy package it to a war. I typically deploy to server using the tomcat manager page. Just browse for the war, click the upload button and it should start right up. On my local machine this is the url that I use to upload to the server http://localhost:8080/manager. The server itself should have the same properties and settings that you are using in your eclipse workspace, and I would highly recommend that it be the same version as well. The war can also be dropped into a directory on the remote host and Tomcat will load this on startup, this location will vary depending on the host.
At the moment my build process consists of repackaging the war file with all required java libraries under WEB-INF/lib and then copying the war file to development/demo/production server to be redeployed by tomcat.
The packaged war file's size is about 41M and it has at the moment something like 40M of external java libraries. There has to be a better way. How have you solved this issue?
My development machine is a windows box with Eclipse as my IDE and Ant as my build tool. The servers are all linux boxes with Tomcat 5.5.
Should I maybe add the jar files to the war package at server side?
I can see what you are saying, and have had the same frustration with some of our webapps, but for consistency sake, I would suggest you keep things as they are. If copying the libraries to the tomcat/lib directory you may run into issues with the system classpath vs. the webapp classpath.
By keeping things as they are you are sure you are deploying the same stuff in development/demo as you are in production. Life sucks when you are manually tweaking stuff in production, or you have some crazy error because you forgot to update XYZ.jar from version 1.6 to 1.6.1_b33 in production and now it's behaving differently than what you believe is the exact same code on demo.
When working with something vital enough to have dev/demo/production systems, I think consistency is much more of an issue than .war file size.
We use the rsync tool for this (in our case, using cygwin under windows) to copy the deployments to the servers (which run linux). We use exploded WAR/EAR files (i.e. a directory structure called MyApp.war rather than a zip file called MyApp.war), rsync will only transfer the files that have changed.
In general use, rsync will transfer our 30-40 megabyte exploded EARs in about 5 seconds.
Tomcat has a shared/lib directory, which is the proper place for global application dependencies. However, these will be visible to all applications, which will affect dependency management and may have consequences for things like static variables. I'm not sure if you can configure anything better in Tomcat.
An alternative is to switch to a more sophisticated web container. For example, WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (a blue-washed version of Geronimo) supports per-asset libraries. Other free and commercial servers support this, too. I know WebSphere Application Server does and I'm pretty sure you can do it in Glassfish.
#McDowell, when mentioning those J2EE servers, you should precise that they are J2EE servers(servlet container + the rest).
Like #digitaljoel, I suggest to keep things like they are. It looks like you haven't done much web application deployment yet. The issues that you'll have are not worth the price(version conflicts, deployment errors, etc.).
Can you add the non-changing Jars to the Java Library Path on the server side, and only include the regularly changing Jars in your WAR?
you could include the external java libraries in the Tomcat/lib directory. That way they stay on the server.
You could just deploy as a JAR file, replicate your deployment environment locally and just copy over the files that have changed and the jar itself. The pathing is the only real issue.
Or you could look into setting up an EAR.
I work with the 'exploded web application' in the development servers, and occasionally in production as well. The deployment process (based on ANT) updates the JARs in WEB-INF/lib with our packages. Only in the development server, we activate Tomcat reloading which takes care of restarting the application when something changes. You should assign some extra permanent memory to these Tomcats and have a way to restart the server, as the reloading may crash Tomcat from time to time.
I know it's a weird configuration, but I can't understand how constantly repackaging the 30MB (and growing) of our typical application could do any better. May one day the development descriptor allow for external references to libraries which the container may download and cache. ??
Excuse my poor English.
What you need is a version control tool and a build process.
Use CSV,SVN,GIT or whatever fit you to keep your source under control.
use a build tool to build your application : Maven,ant,...
Now, when you want to deploy your application on your server ,you just have to commit your updates on your computer,update your source on your server,build your application and deploy it from the server.
This way , the server will just have to load your modifications and it should be much faster.