Run tomcat service for developers

[tanveer]

Hi all,

I have a server with tomcat which developers use and deploy their applications.
Now the practice my earlier team did was set the permission to developer to start/stop the tomcat service.
Now what I want to know is why after deploying or editing any information tomcat needs to be restarted? Does the architecture of tomcat is that way? As per apache the developer just needs to change the contents of web folders not to start/stop apache.
Now is it really what they need?

[jledhead]

if they deploy a new war I don't believe tomcat will deploy it without a restart.

however, if they are editing already deployed files (what is extracted from the war) than it doesn't need a restart.

[blinky]

Generally tomcat does not need to be restarted.

If you modify an installed application then depending what's been changed you might need to restart (eg change a jsp/servlet no need to restart, change a support class that a jsp/servlet is using than a restart is usually required).

Deploy/undeploy an application should not need a restart.

Change stuff in the sever.xml (eg. setup/change a datasource etc) will need a restart.

The way I would do it is for the developers torun their own instance of tomcat (locally on thier workstation and to run it on high port (eg. 8080) while they are developing it stops them trampling on each other and restarts only affect the developer. Once they app stablises or ready for release then delopy to shared instance.