Re: Barracuda: slightly OT: tomcat context control files

Hi Stefan,

That's actually a "Context Configuration File".  It is Tomcat specific and 
contains a single <Context ...> element which, normally, would be entered 
into Tomcat's servler.xml.  In Tomcat-4.1.x (or was it 4.0.x?), however, 
they introduced the concept of defining a context outside the 
server.xml.  This allows for the ability to define your context without 
having to edit the master server.xml file.  Look in Tomcat-4.1.x's webapps 
directory and you will find two xml files.  One called "admin.xml" and one 
called "manager.xml".  Tomcat reads those as if it were defined in the 
server.xml.

In Barracuda's case, you can use the "install" target of the build and it 
will dynamically install Barracuda to Tomcat as long as you have 
TOMCAT_HOME defined as a system environment variable and have defined a 
manager username and password in the build.properties file which matches a 
user in Tomcat's tomcat-users.xml file which has the role of 
"manager".  You also need to make sure that xmlc related jars are either in 
WEB-INF/lib or in CATALNIA_HOME/shared/lib (I always put them in the latter 
especially since the xerces jar isn't supposed to be in WEB-INF/lib, but 
that is a another discussion...).

In Barracuda, the ccf.xml file doesn't do much other than provide for a 
logger so that you can look in CATALINA_HOME/logs and find a file similar 
to this one:
localhost_Barracuda_servlet_log.2003-01-05.txt

However, it can be utilized to a much greater extent such as defining JNDI 
resources and anything else supported by the <Context> element.

The main thing it does, though, is to make it so that your build can be 
anywhere on the system and installed to Tomcat without copying anything to 
Tomcat's webapps directory.  The path for where your build exists is 
determined by the build.xml which does a filter copy of sample.ccf.xml to 
ccf.xml with the dynamically generated path to the WAR directory structure 
(the current path to the "Barracuda" directory).  The ccf.xml file is used 
by the Tomcat Ant manager task to provide information to Tomcat for how to 
install your app, temporarily, into memory.  When Tomcat is shut down, the 
app need to be re-installed.  The "deploy" task permanently installs your 
app so, don't use that one.  It physically updates the server.xml.  You 
don't want to use that except for permanent deployment.

This is actually a pretty long-winded description for what it does.  The 
best way to find out about it is to try it out using:

ant install

Just make sure to have said pre-requisites in place before you run this or 
the install will fail.

Now go to:
http://localhost:8080/Barracuda/

It should be up and running!

See the Tomcat documentation for more info:
http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.1-doc/config/host.html#Automatic%20Application%20Deployment


Additionally,

<quote source="unknown">
For the deploy command, simply include your context confgiuration file in
the WAR at "META-INF/context.xml".

In Tomcat 4.1, you can dynamically deploy a "context configuration file"
instead of, or along with your webapp.  Such a file can contain the
<Context> element, and all nested subelements, from what you would
normally put in server.xml, so you can indeed dynamically deploy an app
with a custom realm.
</quote>

Barracuda doesn't yet make use of the META-INF/context.xml capability for 
the deploy command.  I, actually, only found out about this capability 
relatively recently so I haven't implemented it yet.  Wouldn't be 
difficult, though, so maybe I will once the new server is up at its new 
hosting environment.

Jake

At 03:20 PM 1/5/2003 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Barracuda's uses a ccf.xml in WEB-INF. Has anyone found some docu for
>using ccf? Not in a barracuda-specific way more general. I could not
>found such a thing on jakarta.apache.org.
>
>Thanks,
>Stefan
>
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