Hey All, I am a bit confused in J2EE (and tomcat) concerning the best spot to do a bunch of initializations, and other startup code.
Now, in Coldfusion you have the Application.cfm file which gets run on every request, thus you can load up the application scope (if its unitialized) or recycle it periodically with data/objects (which is great for cache queues). In jsp, I would like to have a jsp file run on initialization so that I can offer that file as a jsp based application initialization file (using custom tags to load up the application scope and even session and other goodies like internationalization bundles etc). It seems the best spot would be a ServletContext listener that would, on startup, fire a request to the Application.jsp file ... but this does not seem possible given the ServletContextListener interface (or is it)? In general, I haven't found much info on best practices for setting up the initial state of an application. If I wanted load up some JNDI entries on startup, where is the best place to do this (in a ServletContextListener perhaps?) ? And for some application attributes, same question. And to initialize the session for a user? I really like the Coldfusion concept of the Application.cfm file since you can do all your state checks there, and then all your scripts/servlets can expect the web application state to be well managed. Its also a great spot for loading in internationalization resource bundles. It would be even better to have a more fine grained Application.jsp file that would fire on initialization and vice versa, and for a few other significant application events. I don't particularly like putting a lot of params in the web.xml file since this can complicate migrations and makes it a bit un-programmatic. I also like having simple custom tags loading the application and session scope so that you can glance at one script for the app and see what is in those scopes by default, rather than having servlets doing their own thing and promoting decentralized scope processes. Any ideas? Thanks, John. -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Troubles with the list: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
