Hi,

20 years ago, Tomcat had an admin webapp which could take over editing
server.xml, used in conjunction with StoreConfig. If you don't know
what it was, here's a link (in French, sorry):
https://www.jmdoudoux.fr/java/dej/chap-tomcat.htm#tomcat-6 .
StoreConfig was brought back already, however development and
maintenance of an admin webapp was no longer worth it and it was fully
removed in Tomcat 6. A revamped manager webapp was floated before, but
for some reason it did not happen. So I tried with a LLM (Qwen 3.8
27B). The goal was to make a modern, reactive (cough cough, as much as
possible at least ...), "app style" webapp which would provide both
the manager and the admin webapp functionality.

I think the result (done over the weekend + yesterday) is actually
decent and it seems usable. Iterating to fix a bug or to add missing
features works well without busting everything.

Internally the thing also looks "ok" (although I cannot judge the .js
stuff ...). It is not meant to replace the existing manager webapp due
to existing tool use. I tried it on my phone, and the dashboard looks
good in portrait mode (the rest: nope, bad). It looks "ok" in
landscape. Maybe the layout could be optimized further, but there's a
lot of data to show on some pages so it seems a bit difficult.
Basically, it's front end stuff and it seems to work, so I'm happy
enough. And there's lots of tests.

I think having this kind of functionality could be "ok" as long as the
maintenance work stays minimal. It seems it could be maintained
exclusively using LLMs so it could work. Given that LLMs are expected
to improve further, it might also be beneficial to regularly replace
it with a brand new full rewrite. UIs don't have to be as frozen as an
API, only the general functionality has to be consistent.

https://github.com/rmaucher/tomcat
The code is almost exclusively in the modules/manager2. There's a
little hack to make TLS config smoother. I don't like it much and I
tried to remove it, but I understand how the LLM found that the TLS
configuration sequence could be annoying when using a UI rather than
editing server.xml.

Rémy

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