[TriLUG] tomcat questions

[Josh Vickery]

I've never done a tomcat install on a PPC machine, but I've done a
number on x86 Debian machines.  The quick answer is that while the
Debian packages are quite good, my standard practice is to use the Sun
JVM and the Tomcat tarball from Jakarta, as I found that combination
to yield the best results overall.

That said, I have used the Debian Tomcat packages, and yes, the
manager interface is packaged separately from the tomcat server, in a
package called tomcat5-admin.  If you are getting out of memory
errors, you may need to increase the max stack size.  I believe that
parameter can be set in /etc/default/tomcat5.  Increasing the amount
of RAM available to tomcat may also help the application be more
responsive.

Tomcat can be configured to reload servlets automatically when they
change on disk.  The easiest way to implement this is to deploy
servlets in .war files, and set the server to expand wars.  Once this
is done, you can delete the deployed war and directory and then copy
the new war in.  You will be able to see that it got deployed (or at
least tomcat attempted to deploy it) when a new directory with the
same name as the war is created.

As for alternate JVMs, IBM makes one that they seem to suggest should
run on Debian PPC on Apple hardware:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/l-pow-apple.html

Josh

On 2/2/06, Steven Blanchard <sgblanch at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am trying set up a development environment for tomcat5 on my
> debian/sid laptop.  Tomcat start times and initial servlet loads are
> painfully slow.  Is this a problem with my setup, or business as
> usual?
>
> Currently, tomcat is using kaffe for it's JVM.  Is there a better JVM
> which I could use?  I can not use an official Sun JVM, as this is a
> powerbook.
>
> Additionally, does anyone have any tips for reloading servlets so I do
> not have to restart tomcat (a 5+ minute ordeal on a 1GHz+1GB tibook).
> The documentation references a /manager interface to deploy servlets,
> but I do not seem have it.  I tried installing the admin interface to
> see if the manager was part of it, but the admin interface throws a
> javax.servlet.ServletException / java.lang.OutOfMemoryError.
>
> I seem to be a touch over my head, and any pointers would be welcome.
>
> Thanks,
> Steven Blanchard
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