Results of 3x19-hour daze of trying to get 4.1.29 working with IIS. Uncovered several major errors in both IIS HOW-TO and the Workers HOW-TO.
There are three section to this email; 'General Complaints', 'IIS HOW-TO', and 'Workers HOW-TO'. General complaints: (in no particular order) 1) The "printer friendly version" isn't. - The printing standard, everywhere civilized, is protrait mode. The dox require landscape mode and any attempts to print in what, for the rest of the world, is normal mode will result in truncation of the rightmost part of the text. I wasted 1/2 a ream of paper finding this out. Paper is cheap, granted, but that also means the loss of half the ink, in a 55CHF ink cartridge, printing out useless drechk. - grrrr 2) Inconsistant handeling of path names. - Older *nix and MS OSes could not deal with space chars in file of path names. Modern OSes do. The default location for applications software, in any version of Windows, newer than Windows for Workgroups, is "C:\Program Files\". All modern and well-written software deals with this. Even Linux/Samba deals with this. Modern Systems Administrators quote appropriate command line statements correctly to deal with this. Importantly, when a piece of code cannot deal with it THEY TELL YOU IN THE DOX! 3) The default install location for all Windows installers should be "C:\Program Files\" and the user should be made to "browse" for other locations. This is every bit as significant as '/usr/local', '/usr/opt', and '/opt, under *nix. If it is important to support naming stands under Linux/Unix then it is equally important to support similar standards under Win2K. 4) No web page should be more than 800 pixels wide. - Many of us (80% of those over 45) have problems reading anything at higher resolution than 1024x768, on anything less than a 21-inch CRT. Most of us are buying LCD monitors, whose highest affordable resolution is 1024x768. Ergo, the default resolution (today) is 1024x768. Web pages that meet or exceed that resolution have to be scrolled to be read. This is normally countered by reducing the font-size to accommodate such recalcitrant dox. However, there is a lower limit to such reduction AND the Tomcat dox pages resist such reduction. This also relates to item 1. IIS HOW-TO: 1) Obviously, all references to Workers HOW-TO point to a defective document, as shown in the section on the workers HOW-TO. 2) "Supported Configuration" is obviously wrong. If you don't have the documentation then you don't have the feature. The documentation for Tomcat 4.1.29, under Win2K IIS, is misleading at best. 3) "Installation" Referenced files are not found. There is no "workers.properties" or "uriworkermap.properties" files to be found anywhere in the Tomcat directory tree. 4) "Configuring the ISAPI Redirector" uses all non-standard path names in it's examples.(see item 2 in the General Complaints). 5) Huge disconnect in "Adding additional Contexts" between contexts, workers, and URL bits. 6) Which leaves "Advanced Context Configuration" completely in the lurch. Workers HOW-TO: This was obviously written for Tomcat 3 and never updated for Tomcat 4.1.29. I hit 10 errors and stopped logging. These indicate huge problems and this document should have never been included in the Tomcat 4.1.29 release. Not even as a guidline. It is more misleading than useful. 1) Completely skips the obvious first steps: - Included excerpt from my workers.properties file (see Item 2 in the "General Complaints"). This is early in the workers.properties files and is not explained at all, other than to state that it's for JNI support. # workers.tomcat_home should point to the location where you # installed tomcat. This is where you have your conf, webapps and lib # directories. # workers.tomcat_home=C:\Program Files\Java\Tomcat 4.1 # workers.tomcat_home=c:\tomcat # workers.tomcat_home=/usr/local/tomcat # # workers.java_home should point to your Java installation. Normally # you should have a bin and lib directories beneath it. # workers.java_home=C:\Program Files\Java\_jvm # workers.java_home=c:\jdk1.3 # workers.java_home=/usr/java # # You should configure your environment slash... ps=\ on NT and / on UNIX # and maybe something different elsewhere. # ps=\ # ps=/ 2) Introduction is completely accurate yet, completely inadequate. What is the relationship of a worker instance to a URL? What is a Tomcat context? Where is the referal to a document that can explain these things ( the file "Tomcat: A Minimalistic User's Guide", is not found)? 3) "Defining Workers" gives syntax only with no explaination of content. Are these name referenced by the calling URL? 4) "Workers Type" is almost meaningless in light of item 3. Sometimes, stating the obvious, at least once, is a good thing. 5) "Setting Worker Properties" Same complaint as item 4. 6) "inprocess and out process need to be explained or refered to another doc. 7) The discussion of JNI properties should include a one paragraph description of what JNI is. 8) "Classpath" - There is no tomcat.jar file to be found anywhere in the 4.1.29 directory tree. 9) All references to "*\jre\bin\classic" are broken. Such a path does not exist in the tomcat 4.1.29 directory tree. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
