Hi,

I would like to Tomcat Manager Module, so we can easily configure Tomcat..

Thanks

Partha

I'm a year late, but that actually sounds nice!

What would a Tomcat manager do, exactly? (I've never used Tomcat, so I'm unsure of what management of it would entail.)

My meager understanding is that it is an application server for Java applications. So, it runs independently of Apache, kinda like Mongrel does for Ruby on Rails apps. Am I right? So we'd want an install interface (or maybe just insure packages are available), a start/stop button for each instance of Tomcat (I assume they are independent per-domain?), and maybe a form for auto-installing applications that run in Tomcat (there is some sort of standard package for Tomcat apps, right?).

You can think of Tomcat as an application server for Java applications. I have not set it up to run congruently with Apache, although I hear it is done.

I'm new enough with Java that I've always placed my applications directly into the Tomcat directory structure and run them using Tomcat alone. I'm not even sure how well Tomcat plays with virtual domains. But, if you guys happened to learn more about it than I do, it would be wonderful to have some sort of automatic Tomcat setup feature that combines directory locations for virtual servers.

Tomcat uses a deployment descriptor file that can include runtime and control parameters for the application. It would be nice to provide for maintenance of such a file. I currently must restart Tomcat each time I deploy something under it. If we could deploy from a remote location and hit a "Restart" button, that could be beneficial.

This is not a high priority to me ... it's just a "if you know the system better than I, it would be nice" type of thing. I'm sure there are people out there laughing their heads off about my meager attempts to describe this thing.

Hehehe...Well, since nobody is using Tomcat enough to be able to give us some guidance, I would ordinarily have to guess that not enough people are using it to make it worth our time. ;-)

But, in reality, we have recently had a few other conversations with Java developers at a recent Sun-sponsored event, that seem to indicate that one of the reasons we're not hearing anything about Java in virtual hosting environments is because nobody offers it. So, it's a self-reinforcing situation. Nobody who hosts in a shared hosting environment develops in Java because nobody will host it for them, and nobody asks us about it because nobody is using Java in a shared environment. So, we hear more and more about PHP, because it is so pervasive, and less about Java, because nobody uses it.

Anyway, I won't make any promises, but I think Java as a platform is becoming really interesting again. I don't really care for Java as a language, but it's hard to ignore that massive library of existing functionality, and with Jython, JRuby, Groovy, Scala and other dynamic languages that run on the JVM, it's becoming a pretty cool platform again. It's also got some interesting possibilities as a VM for running hosted applications (ala Google App Engine and Heroku), and we find that space really interesting.