Tomcat & Embedded()

Question

I am having a problem transferring my webapp from my development Jbuilder6 IDE with integrated TomCat 4.0 to a non integrated version of Tomcat 4.0.
I am using a servlet that runs on startup that uses the Embedded class to build an an engine and multiple hosts. Within the JBullder environment this works fine, but when I to run it outside of JBuilder Tomcat will run only part of the servlet. The servlet stops running at the line Embedded embedded = newEmbedded().
For example:
public void init() throws ServletException {
System.out.println("here1");
System.setProperty("catalina.home","C:/EmbeddedTomcat");
Embedded embedded = new Embedded();
System.out.println("here2");
will output only 'here1' in the tomcat console.
I am new to catalina development so any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I may be out of line here but you probably could get this to work...it would be a bit of a hack job but it is possible.
With regards to your "NoClassDefFound" problem (and adding dynamic contexts) I believe your problem is that there is a rarely used var that you can set in server.xml that allows the user to access the main Tomcat jars. The main Tomcat classes are separated from the webapp specific classes on startup...i.e. loaded completely separately and access is closed off for security. The var I mentioned changes this.
Unfortunately, it's been a while since I was reading up on this so I completely forget the name of it....it's some type of "Factory" object/var that exposes the JARs you need.
Once you get access to the other side of Tomcat, then you "should" be able to use the main JARs to dynamically reload contexts and webapps using the same methods and classes tomcat itself uses to start.
I would guess that to develop this into a production capable solution would take quite some time....but who knows
ON THE LOG ISSUE......something to note...check out the /logs directory and see if your System.out.println() calls are being fed to the logs....tomcat seems to like making this the stdout as opposed to the console...which is reasonnable considering most production versions won't have the error logs piped to the screen :)
Hope some of this helps...like I said..it's been a while since I've looked into this so I could be wrong.
RG