Egor Samarkhanov wrote:
André,
Thanks for your notes! Please see my comments inline.
AW> Personal opinion:
AW> By putting some considerable effort into it, it is certainly possible to do something like
AW> that, by rewriting URLs and/or proxying and/or making all your pages refer to the context
AW> etc..
AW> But the question is : why ?
AW> If
AW> - you have many, many "clients"
Yes, I do have really many clients, and hope to get even more.
And in future I'd like to implement a failover solution with Tomcat
cluster. If i have these many applications deployed, then they will
be deployed on all nodes. I guess it would be much better if one
node contains a single application which can serve any client
(plus session replication). This way the cluster would be more
effective.
AW> - or you application is so big that having multiple copies of it totally
fills your disk
It's pretty big, but the disk space is not the real concern, but
the memory. Many deployments of the same application consume lots of
PermGen.
AW> - or your application for "client1" needs to share data with the application for
"client2"
No, it doesn't.
AW> then it may be worth thinking about this.
AW> But otherwise, you probably would immensely simplify your life by using a separate virtual
AW> host for each client, and have for each virtual host a separate appBase, in which you just
AW> deploy a copy of your application.
By the way, I was thinking about virtual hosts, but I didn't find any
solution yet to add new virtual hosts at runtime (to tomcat, or to apache
httpd).
AW> Think of the security issues otherwise, to avoid one client being ever able to access the
AW> data of another;
Good point.
AW> or think of what happens when one of these clients in the future asks you
AW> for that little change just for him.. etc..
Yes, thinking about it all the time. But we didn't have such cases for
2 years, and if it happens - we would deploy the customized version to
some other, separate environment.
So, where do I start if I decide to go with the single virtual
application? Did someone try doing such things?
In that case, I would start with an Apache httpd front-end, connected to Tomcat via
mod_proxy and mod_proxy_ajp, or via mod_jk. You could then easily proxy any request to
your single webapp running under Tomcat.
E.g.
http://front-end.company.com/client1/webapp -> tomcat:/single_webapp
http://front-end.company.com/client2/webapp -> tomcat:/single_webapp
...
http://front-end.company.com/clientn/webapp -> tomcat:/single_webapp
and use combinations of Proxy rules, Rewrite rules, SetHeaders rules etc.. to make sure
that when your webapp returns pages, they correctly continue to refer to "client1",
"client2" etc..
You just have to make sure then that your webapp always has enough information available,
to know for which client it is being called.
You can also do this with virtual hosts at the Apache level, all proxying to the same
back-end tomcat. And there are tricks at the Apache level to handle "dynamic virtual hosts".
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