apache/tomcat

[Ronnie Livingston]

Hi, I was wondering what is the purpose of restarting Apache and/or tomcat when one is developing servlets and jsps? If im a systems administrator for a linux machine would i have to give my users permissions to do this? how would it be done?
thanks

[Andrew Shafer]

The server process needs to be restarted for a few reasons, but basically it all boils down to you changed something.
Not all changes require a restart, but adding classes or context to the server do, if I was a developer, I would be pissed if I didn't at least have a test server that I could restart without an admin.
I'm no expert sysadmin, but I keep my machines, I think all they would need is to be able to execute the startup scripts for tomcat. Don't quote me, but I think you would only need to restart apache if you add modules or something major, so you could probably get away with setting that up and letting it run.

[Anonymous]

Helo!
I agree with Andrew ( which, by the way, is natural since Antti gets translated to Andrew )
What I have been experienced of tomcat, one can do loads of changes "on fly" - tomcat even seems to have some thread to peek these.Of course (?!) you cannot change classpath and stuff like that.
Oh, I am running tomcat 4.
------------------
Antti Barck
It Solutions Consultant -- NSD Oy
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java™ 2 Platform

[Tim Holloway]

The primary reason to restart Tomcat would be changes to the server.xml file, although it has somewhat of a reputation for not always detecting a need to recompile JSP's (at least in some versions) - which a restart can usually cure.
The docs indicate that Apache should be restarted if Tomcat is restarted because there's an open pipeline between the two. In practical experience, I'm not so sure. Then again, the docs may be outdated.