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I've been deploying webapps with Tomcat since 1997, so you'd think I should
know what I'm doing by now...

But I find I don't. I'm increasingly trying to package my webapps so that they
can be 'just dropped in' without any skill or knowledge being needed by the
site administrator to get them set up and deployed, and this has raised two
problems with relation to persistent workspace.

If a preconfigured war file is installed into Tomcat using the manager webapp,
it doesn't get unpacked, and in many ways that's a good thing. But I have up
till now used sub-directories of the webapp root directory to store
persistent data, for example cached pages and uploaded files. More
particularly, I've been using the presence of a file 'WEB-INF/hymen.txt' as a
marker that this webapp has never been accessed before and needs final
initialisation, and had any servlet redirect to a special servlet which
handled final setup if that file exists. Obviously, the final setup servlet
then removed the marker file. Clearly neither of these things work if the
webapp is delivered as a war file.

Generally my webapps talk to databases (usually SQL databases, but could be
LDAP, or other things) so it should be possible to replace the 'hymen.txt'
mechanism with a simple database call which will succeed if the database has
been initialised but fail if it hasn't.

However this doesn't solve the problem of where to put caches and upload
directories, and I can't find anything in the Servlet API which helps with
this. I really don't want to be storing large lumps of arbitrary data into
the database.

Is there any mechanism in the Servlet spec which allows me either
(i) to request that my war file should be unpacked when it is deployed, or
else
(ii) to get hold of some persistent filespace that my webapp can write to?

Cheers

Simon

- --
simon@(protected)/
 ;; Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees,
 ;; lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk,
 ;; garbage, slime pits, and debris.        -- Edward Abbey

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