Yoav, I do apologise if it appears I am being prolific with problems and I do apologise if this is over critical, but it is testamount to the lack of quality documentation on Tomcat (and jakarta projects in general it has to be said) that has resulted in my not understanding how Tomcat is working in certain respects and the reason I feel I must request help from the list. This seems to be a general problem across all development projects as far as I can see and I suppose the fact that Tomcat is opensource does not motivate its developers to write properly about the product.
If the mechanism by which tomcat reloads a web application creates a new classloader and allows the old one to be left intact with its references, then I would say that should be documented. I mean I randomly selected a tomcat 5 documentation page and found this highly useful description of a web context Context - In a nutshell, a Context is a web application. Term2 - This is it. Term3 - This is it! Fantastic. I don't really want to be looking the Tomcat sources to understand how it address dynamic classloading or memory handling, maybe I'm missing the point and should motivate my company to purchase a commercial app server. I think a lot of people come up against this since most posts on this list could be addressed through documentation. Anyway, that is a different issue altogether..I am eagerly awaiting the Professional Tomcat 5.0 book due out soon!! My classes maintain references as static singletons using a registry. I do not consider this to be bad design at all contrary to your supposition. In fact, the application is architected around J2EE architecture design patterns. The part of your answer that was useful was to hear that the class loader is left intact, and therefore if this is case I understand why I may eventually get to an OutOfMemoryException. Further, I will not be allowing reloading of webapps when the product goes live and the product does not have outofmemory issues so long as the webapp is left without reloading. Thank you for your help, and sorry to be critical. ADC. -- snip -- It depends on how your classes maintain references. Since the old classloader is intact, static references from your servlets, for example, will be kept. Tomcat can't do anything about that, it's your own bad design in the context of reloading webapps (it might be OK design in a console java program). Yoav Shapira <FONT SIZE=1 FACE="VERDANA,ARIAL" COLOR=BLUE> ------------------------------------------------------- QAS Ltd. Developers of QuickAddress Software <a href="http://www.qas.com";>www.qas.com</a> Registered in England: No 2582055 Registered in Australia: No 082 851 474 ------------------------------------------------------- </FONT> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
