Professional Apache Tomcat 6

Chapter 8. Web Application Administration

This chapter discusses how to manage Web applications using the tools provided by Tomcat. Tomcat's management tools include the manager application and the new virtual-host manager. The manager application helps manage Web applications. It enables administrators to deploy Web applications, view deployed applications, and undeploy Web applications when necessary. While these tasks can also be performed manually by editing Tomcat's configuration files, this method requires Tomcat to be restarted. The manager application automates these tasks and enables them to be performed on a running instance of Tomcat. This way, other Web applications that are already running in the same Tomcat container are left undisturbed.

This chapter covers the manager application. The chapter first looks at a sample Web application that is used as an example throughout the chapter. Then it discusses in detail the manager application, including the following areas:

• Enabling access to the manager application

• The three ways of interacting with the manager application (the Web-based user interface, Ant scripts, and HTTP commands)

• Security conlsiderations while using the manager application

Sample Web Application

This chapter uses a simple Web application for testing the manager commands. This application consists of nothing more than one HTML file and one JSP file.

The HTML file (index.html) contains a form that asks for the user's name and uses HTTP POST to send the result ...