changes to web.xml requires application restart?

[Raghavender Ammagari]

Hi

I was just testing if changes to web.xml file requires a restart of the web application to reflect the changes...for that I just created a jsp page and tried to give it a display name as below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app>
	<servlet>
		<servlet-name>PageName</servlet-name>
		<jsp-file>/serverpage.jsp</jsp-file>
	</servlet>

	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>PageName</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/displayname/*</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

i could see that serverpage.jsp opens well with this URL http://localhost:8080/MyWebApp/displayname. Now if I change the displayname to some other name and save the web.xml file, the new name became the display name for that jsp without any need of restarting my web application. I heard that such changes to web.xml actually will need to require a web application restart for the changes to reflect. If that is the case I have no clue how this worked without restarting the web app.

Otherwise, in case that.. changes to only some specific elements of the web.xml file requires the application restart..can you please list them out.

Thanks
Raghav

[Bear Bibeault]

If configured to do so, Tomcat will automatically restart web apps if it detects changes.

[Raghavender Ammagari]

hey thanks for the reply, can you please elaborate your answer and help me out in knowing about those configuration settings in tomcat..and is that applicable only to web.xml file or any other configuration file that I use and is specific to my web app?

[Bear Bibeault]

Don't remember off the top of my head. Look in the docs.

I seem to remember a reloadable attribute on <Context>.

[Raghavender Ammagari]

I could see a Watchedresource tag in context.xml file

<Context>
 <!-- Default set of monitored resources -->
<WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>
</Context>

is this the same that you said in your reply ?? If yes, can i add few more .properties files along withe the web.xml file... to these watched resource tags??

[Sunny Bhandari]

This behaviour of automating the restart is known as Hot Deploy...