Re: Meta Information in Action Form

[Dave Newton]

Craig McClanahan wrote:
On Apr 8, 2005 11:28 AM, Dave Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 

I haven't done much (anything?) with servlet listeners--what's the
advantage to doing it this way as opposed to a servlet.init that loads
on app startup? Generally what we've done is to have a thread that
checks a flag that signals DB changes that then calls the same code to
reload everything. I'm not too involved with that part of the code though.
The servlet container is *not* required to leave your load-on-startup
servlet loaded for the entire duration of the webapp's lifetime
(although, in practice, most containers do).  For example, the
container could unload a servlet that it sees isn't being used, or if
it has memory contention issues, or for whatever reason is desired.
 

If the servlet is just putting objects into application scope does this 
matter?

We weren't using the same servlet to reload that app-scoped data (don't 
ask; I don't know) but even if we were, would the only penalty be time? 
IOW, the servlet isn't "gone forever," right?

A ServletContextListener, on the other hand, guarantees that
contextInitialized() will get called at startup time (before any
requests have been processed), and contextDestroyed() will get called
at shutdown time (after the last request), no matter what happens in
between.
 

I think I'll move all this stuff over to there anyway; that sounds much 
cleaner.

Thanks!
Dave