We're trying to come up with a way to use Tomcat integrated with Apache in our production enviroment. In this environment, we have "service" managers and "system" managers. There may be multiple services (and hence multiple service managers) per machine. And there'd be one Tomcat instance per service. The management of Tomcat would be the responsibility of the service managers, while the management of Apache would be the responsibility of the system manager.
The ideal case would be if these duties could be totally separated. But we've been having problems coming up with an arrangement that allows this. The problem is that the connector directives (whether it be mod_jk or mod_webapp) that tell Apache what URLs to forward to a particular Tomcat instance must be in Apaches httpd.conf file (which is under control of the system manager, recall). This is a problem when the service manager wants to deploy new web applications. Some comments: 1. We could have httpd.conf "include" a file under each service manager's control. But this is undesirable. 2. If the connector directives could be specified in .htaccess files, this would give us the control we need. But apparently this is not possible. It's my understanding that when a directive is created, it is specified what context it can be used in, where server, virtualhost, and htaccess are some of the possible contexts. Is there some special reason mod_jk and mod_webapp directives are not allowed in htaccess context? What would it take to add this? Is this something the tomcat developers would consider doing. 3. What exactly is the JkAutoMount directive, and is it implemented in any connector? I saw this, and it looked it could be used to have the web server (Apache) query the servlet container (Tomcat) was to what URL's/contexts there were. But details were sketchy. But if this mechanism did exist, we might be able to use to do what we want. 4. I don't know exactly how the Tomcat manager application handles installing/starting webapps, but if it works when Tomcat is integrated with Apache, this too might allow us to do what want. However, I've recently gathered that this mechanism only works with Tomcat standalone, so it probably won't help us. Any info that might helps us get closer to what we're trying to do would surely be appreciated. That might be elaboration/clarification of some of the ideas mentioned above, or some other ideas I didn't mention. Thanks! Milt Epstein Research Programmer Systems and Technology Services (STS) Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
