war file deployment

[Gopu Akraju]

I have deployed war files of web based applications into webapps folder of tomcat installed in the production server. Tomcat was being installed by someone.

Now I am working on another server (for development instance) which does not have tomcat installed. In order to use my web application (ie) to deploy in the server, what are all the list of things for me to do. The server is a solaris system. I have very basic unix knowledge.

Any advice/suggestions would be more useful to start my project.

Thanks and Regards
Gopu

[Bear Bibeault]

installing Tomcat might be a good start.

[Tim Holloway]

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
installing Tomcat might be a good start.

Although there's an unexpected twist when you're talking Solaris.

I haven't looked at the absolute latest distro, but the tomcat packages for Solaris 10 were for tomcat 4.1 - which was already past End Of Life when Solaris 10 came out! I know that vendors like to be conservative, but that's more than conservative - it's coming out the other end. End of Life means that effectively no one on the Tomcat team supports it any more.

I don't know if there's a more up-to-date packaging on sunfreeware.com. We always just downloaded and unzipped direct from apache.org. However, if you're running Solaris zones, the Sun version - obsolete though it is, is better suited for zones, since it breaks Tomcat into 2 parts. One package is the sharable read-only stuff (/usr/local and the like) and the other is the read-write stuff that has to be unique per zone such as the logs, work directories and config files.

[Gopu Akraju]

Sorry for the confusion caused. The server is a linux system and not the solaris. Thanks for the suggestion. Hence any compatible version for linux?

[Prashant Karmankar]

what version of tomcat you are going to use ? if it is latest tomcat version then configured it on RHEL5.

Prashant K

[Peter Johnson]

Gopu, you need two things. First install a Sun JDK (the latest 1.6 or 1.5 will work fine). The JDK that comes with most Linux distro's is not up to running web servers. Though this is changing - the Open JVM that comes with the latest Ubuntu distro should work just fine. Once installed, set JAVA_HOME to where it was installed.

Second, download the latest version of Tomcat (or even the version you are running on the other system) from the Tomcat download site. Unpack it where you like (I put mine in /opt, but you can put it anywhere).

Then you are all ready to do.

One more thing - when it comes to Java apps like Tomcat, the question of compatibility with an operating system is actually what JVM will run on the operating system, and then which version of the Java app will run on that JVM.

[Tim Holloway]

RHEL and some related distros have RPMs for the Java stuff. Normally I prefer RPMs, since they are managed and monitored by the package manager and get accounted for in the RPM database.

However, the RPM collection for Java is extremely fine-grained, and you're at the mercy of the package assemblers as to what versions are going to be installed. So I typically don't use them and just download from the original developer sites (jakarta, jboss.org, etc.). Sun has an RPM for the JDK - that I normally do use, although all it really does is make a subdirectory under /usr/java with a name indicating the release and unpacks the JDK into that directory.

Ubuntu - or maybe Debian - is doing some stuff that seems a little more manageable, but for production servers, I prefer Red Hat - they've spent more years and effort on server support, whereas the Debian crowd spent more effort on desktop systems.

Mainly this means that Red Hat has some tools designed to provision and control server farms that (so far) haven't made a successful jump to Debian, though Ubuntu is making a good attempt at it.