Hi
I need to launch an initialization procedure as soon as my web application is deployed on Tomcat (working on a 6.0.20). As per the documentation, I can define a LifecycleListener in my context.xml file for the webapp in question. However, the documentation says that it needs to be packed as a jar and be copied to $CATALINA_HOME/lib. And that's where I have my catch 22.. my implementation of LicecycleListener needs access to objects defined in the webapp - so I figure I have to deploy basically the entire solution to $CATALINA_HOME/lib (which can be problematic if you run different webapps making use of different versions of the same lib), then go hack the build file so that it won't package my libs with the webapp anymore. Am I misunderstanding something here? Shouldn't there be a deployment way where I can keep the webapp self-contained? Or how can I get my LifeCycleListener which I have to deploy outside my webapp to gain access to the set of classes and libs that are part of the webapp? In other words.. if mynamespace.MyLifeCycleListener is located in $CATALINA_HOME/lib/CustomMyLifeCycleListener.jar, how will it have access to libs and classes located in $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/MyebApp/WEB-INF/lib (or ..../WEB-INF/classes/mynamespace)? After writing these lines I figured I'd go ahead and test a little.. so I created two libs The Launcher Lib (launcherlib.jar) to be placed in $CATALINA_HOME/lib The webapp lib (webapp-lib.jar) (which is used by both the launcher lib and the webapp lib) And the webapp itself (webapp.war) Netbeans automatically adds a copy of the webapp lib to it. So I first copied the launcher lib including the launcher lib's own lib dir (containing catalina.jar and webapp-lib.jar) to the tomcat lib directory. Then I deployed the webapp.. and it worked out just fine. In the launcher app I initialize a singleton object in the webapp lib, and then dump the fact that the initialization has been done to the console (system.out.println). Looking at the Tomcat logs I see that this is being done properly each time the webapp is being started. However, if I get the same singleton object from the webapp and query its initialization state, it tells me it is not initialized.. so indicating that the two instances of the webapp lib run completely separate. So I went ahead and changed the manifest file of the launcher lib to reference the deployed webapp lib jar file and removed the reference to catalina.jar (it's in the same directory so it shouldn't matter). Stopped and restarted the webapp.. the launcher lib still does its thing just fine, but then accessing the webapp it still tells me the singleton is not initialized.. so it's not a matter of where to put the files, but even though the launcher lib is referenced in the context of the webapp, it seems to run under a separate context and that's a problem - I need the LifeCycleListener to initialize something that can then be used by the webapp (I figure that's the main point to have a LifeCycleListener for a specific webapp).. so how can I get the launcher lib and the webapp to share their state? Regards Stephan
