I'm not on the debian-java list, so I may have missed some postings on this, but here is my 2c anyway.
Thom May wrote:
Right. Here we go again. As it may be obvious by now, I'm quite keen to get this done. (I'm packaging up Jetty at the moment, which is a servlet-2.2 compatible engine.)
Jetty is also a HTTP/1.1 www server. I don't know how that can be modelled nicely, as most containers also provide HTTP. In some it is just a token effort, but in Jetty it is the main thrust of the package.
2) Webapps are drawn from /usr/share/java/webapps and the libraries are drawn from /usr/share/java .
3) JSPs should be useable from /var/www/*.jsp - this complies with debian webserver guidelines.
You will have to clarify how these relate to a webapp? Is a new webapp created and configured at /var/www ? If so, then
static content could also be served. In fact /var/www could
just be a default webapp, ie it could have a /var/www/WEB-INF
This would clarify the issue of Context paths:
/var/www contextPath = / /usr/share/java/webapps/myApp contextPath = /myApp/*
Points to look into:
1) Apache modules are able to add their LoadModule lines to /etc/apache/httpd.conf even though that is a conf file. is it worth investigating a mechanism (possibly using update-alternatives) to allow global contexts to be added to a servlet engine?
is it worth considering a webapps.conf file in /etc/java somewhere that describes all the webapps:
/ /var/www * /usr/share/java/webapps/* /local /usr/local/mySpecialWebApp
cheers
