Tomcat 4 as service plus invoke servlet on startup

Question

Hi all. My two questions are as follows, any feedback is much appreciated.
1st)
I wish to run tomcat as a service where it will start automatically on startup plus you can restart it from the win 2000 service console. I have followed the advice on the following link http://www.prabhums.org/weblogs/?postid=237 which places an entry into the service console but doesn't start or stop tomcat as required.
2nd)
On tomcat startup I wish to invoke a servlet when the service starts. Where would I config this and any parameters etc? web.xml?
Thanks in advance
Tas

Answer 1

It's very simple to have a servlet startup. Just use the load-on-startup element in your wbe.xml when you define the servlet.
<servlet>
   <servlet-name>MyServlet</servlet-name>
   <servlet-class>com.kcole.mypackage.MyServlet</servlet-class>
   <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>Use a different number. I believe the numbers indicate order of startup.
We use them to mainly to start processes/threads that run at an interval, like a TimerTask for example. We use them for things like setting up our custom connection pool and setting up jobs such as checking directories for files to import, etc.
As to what the request and response objects contain, I don't think there are any. The servlet spec doesn't say regarding this when using the load-on-startup. It runs the init() method.
Karl