Seam and shared jars in tomcat

[sherkan777]

Hi,
I got 3 Seam 2 applications on tomcat 6.
In all applications jar files are placed in WEB-INF/lib directory. Can I move all of them to Tomcat6/lib if I use for all applications seam jar versions? If yes, than which?

[israel.bgf]

I want to know this too. All the library for each war is somewhat a big waste of space. I tried to put them in the lib dir, and it works for one application, but with multiple seam applications, things start to blow-up.

[luxspes]

Putting it all in the shared lib dir will become a big problem as you start having more Seam based applications, and you start to have some with Seam 2.1, some with 2.2, some with 2.3, some with 3.0 and some with 3.1... (and that is without adding the possibility that some of them might need a different version of Hibernate, or of Richfaces, or of...)

In an ideal world, you would have the time to always update them to the latest Seam/Hibernate/Richfaces/Whatever version... but this is not an idea world... this a real world...

The solution(s)?

1. Use a different Tomcat instance for each of your Seam applications (this solution has the extra advantage that you get ProcessIsolation) the disadvantage is that there is no easy way to balance memory use between Tomcat instances (or JBoss instances or...)


2. Use Apache Geronimo, Geronimo  has a versioned .jar repository that makes it possible to share the .jars of different Seam versions between those app that need them (and at the same time have the right version of Seam for each app).Sadly AFAIK JBoss AS does not have this feature... Am I wrong?

[israel.bgf]

Well, my real world is even worse. I'm renting a host, and it dont gives me full control of tomcat (/lib dir for example), as far i know its using the virtual hosts feature of tomcat. So i really cant have multiple tomcat installations. And well, i dont matter of handling Seam versions, just keep a stable one like the 2.2, and after some time i would try a update.

[v.lukoyanov]

I'm using configuration with tomcat (one vhost per app) and shared seam jars in production env. Everything seem to work just fine, but my applications are rather simple.

The only bug i noticed recently is a bug with seam mail. More deatails here.

[israel.bgf]

And how exactly did you do that configuration Vasilii? I'm very noob about tomcat configuration. :)

I will give some tries with a local tomcat.

[v.lukoyanov]

The setup is quite simple.

1. make dir /tomcat/lib/seam
2. put required seam jars to /tomcat/lib/seam
3. in /tomcat/conf/catalina.properties set shared.loader=${catalina.home}/lib/seam/*.jar
4. if necessary configure vhosts in /tomcat/conf/server.xml

now you can deploy your apps without Seam jars in WEB-INF/lib

[israel.bgf]

Hmm, thks, I will give a try.

[jaumzera]

Hey guys... sorry to reopen this question, but I think it's pertinent.
I've setup my Tomcat with that configuration, but after some time the Seam apps stop creating new sessions and the users are not able to log in anymore. Does anyone have some idea?