It is really jasper (the JSP engine from jakarta) that needs tools.jar. Tomcat is just one of several servlet containers to use jasper.
Note that jasper2 no longer directly uses tools.jar, as it uses ant to do all it's compiling. Thus whatever ant.jar needs to find tools.jar is what jasper and hence tomcat needs.
So hopefully the tools.jar dependancy will soon be history. Thus anything done to support it in the short term should clearly be of a temporary nature.
cheers
Joe Phillips wrote:> On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 19:36, Ben Burton wrote:
Can't say much about the tools.jar issue; I don't know what it provides and how standardised that is.
I haven't delved too deeply into the bowels of JBOSS/Tomcat *yet* but as
I understand it, it contains the java compiler.
Here's my understanding in a nutshell, I'm happy to be corrected/educated if I'm mistaken:
The Sun java compiler is written in java. javac is merely a front-end to loading and running the correct java code.
Java Server Pages are basically HTML with Java sprinkled within. JSP containers convert the JSP source to a servlet (.java file) and then compile the servlet to a .class file. The servlet is then executed within the container.
The compile step requires a java compiler. Servlet containers I'm
familiar with (Tomcat, jserv, JBOSS+tomcat) require an external
compiler.
AFAIK, they depend on the Sun implementation. I do not know about the standardization. My guess is there is no standardization between JDK vendors. It *seems* for Sun JDKs, at least the jarfile and class names seem consistant. I've never had compiler-related problems running Tomcat across J2SDKs.
-joe
-- Greg Wilkins<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Phone/fax: +44 7092063462 Mort Bay Consulting Australia and UK. http://www.mortbay.com
