Embedded Tomcat

Download from http://www.nyangau.org/et/et.zip.

Overview

Often people develop web applications and deploy the resulting .war file to Tomcat, or other servlet engine, or application server.

These servlet engines can come with their own baggage, which includes complex installation, configuration and administration. It also can include larger deployment footprints and runtime requirements. As servlet engines can sometimes be provided by other groups or departments, operational/procedural dependencies can be created between AD groups and web teams or system administrators.

Often what you want is that some application you have written should also listen on a port and serve web content too. Or perhaps the packaging and deployment framework within which you work doesn't play nicely with the operational constraints described above.

So for this, we can use Embedded Tomcat. This makes Tomcat a part of your application. Your application includes a few Tomcat related .jar files. Upon startup, the application creates a new Tomcat(), customises it a little and starts it listening for web requests.

This package is really a demonstration of how this can work.

Components

This package delivers three Maven projects.

My WAR

The mywar project is a simple web application. It includes some static content and a servlet.

The servlet appears in three places (url-patterns), two requiring authenticated access, one also requiring confidential access (ie: SSL).

The pom.xml produces a .war as its result.

In principle, this .war could be deployed to real Tomcat, another servlet engine or application server, or even to the cloud.

Web Container using Embedded Tomcat

The wcet project depends on the appropriate Tomcat .jars.

This includes a WCET class, which is what instantiates Embedded Tomcat and customises it :-

The code explicitly avoids log rotation based on date, as runaway logging can fill a disk and take a system down before rotation kicks in. Instead it promises to keep within a disk size limit, and if runaway logging does occur, the worst that happens is that the logs don't go back as far in time as they would normally. Log numbers and sizes have defaults which can be overridden using properties.

My Web Process

The mywebproc project instantiates a WCET, registers My WAR into it, and starts listening.

The main .java file is therefore very short and unexciting. It is likely that in real use, userids and passwords might be obtained from a credential store and configured into the WCET.

Its pom.xml depends on the mywar project and the wcet project.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is the use of an assembly.xml to construct the file deployable asset. It creates a .zip file containing something like this :-

$ unzip -v mywebproc-0.1-SNAPSHOT-bin.zip
Archive:  mywebproc-0.1-SNAPSHOT-bin.zip
 Length   Method    Size  Cmpr    Date    Time   CRC-32   Name
--------  ------  ------- ---- ---------- ----- --------  ----
       0  Stored        0   0% 02-10-2022 20:28 00000000  base/
       0  Stored        0   0% 02-10-2022 20:28 00000000  base/webapps/
    4148  Defl:N     2845  31% 02-10-2022 19:51 9376bd62  base/webapps/mywar.war
       0  Stored        0   0% 12-29-2015 16:03 00000000  keystores/
    3169  Defl:N     1763  44% 12-29-2015 16:03 b6bb4483  keystores/webserver.jks
       0  Stored        0   0% 02-10-2022 20:28 00000000  lib/
 2870966  Defl:N  2733644   5% 02-10-2022 19:50 6cda2b41  lib/ecj-3.18.0.jar
    2642  Defl:N     1736  34% 02-10-2022 20:16 bf6f50e3  lib/mywebproc-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
   13197  Defl:N    10519  20% 02-10-2022 19:50 87585847  lib/tomcat-annotations-api-9.0.58.jar
   11515  Defl:N     9524  17% 02-10-2022 19:50 f91a4cd2  lib/tomcat-api-9.0.58.jar
   89206  Defl:N    82613   7% 02-10-2022 19:50 9ff1b8aa  lib/tomcat-el-api-9.0.58.jar
 3430643  Defl:N  3200352   7% 02-10-2022 19:50 3682af03  lib/tomcat-embed-core-9.0.58.jar
  257028  Defl:N   237730   8% 02-10-2022 19:50 c3e6af37  lib/tomcat-embed-el-9.0.58.jar
  651819  Defl:N   607585   7% 02-10-2022 19:50 549b4319  lib/tomcat-embed-jasper-9.0.58.jar
  570508  Defl:N   534843   6% 02-10-2022 19:50 fb791dcf  lib/tomcat-jasper-9.0.58.jar
  172138  Defl:N   157961   8% 02-10-2022 19:50 08f708bc  lib/tomcat-jasper-el-9.0.58.jar
  150070  Defl:N   140821   6% 02-10-2022 19:50 469669fa  lib/tomcat-jdbc-9.0.58.jar
   63640  Defl:N    54090  15% 02-10-2022 19:50 53c27ba5  lib/tomcat-jsp-api-9.0.58.jar
   47110  Defl:N    43328   8% 02-10-2022 19:50 b2d3ce6e  lib/tomcat-juli-9.0.58.jar
  284411  Defl:N   266700   6% 02-10-2022 19:50 bfac375b  lib/tomcat-servlet-api-9.0.58.jar
  213406  Defl:N   194836   9% 02-10-2022 19:50 a930db61  lib/tomcat-util-9.0.58.jar
  224107  Defl:N   203994   9% 02-10-2022 19:50 e0fc920d  lib/tomcat-util-scan-9.0.58.jar
   10930  Defl:N     9812  10% 02-10-2022 20:28 580e9ea9  lib/wcet-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
      84  Defl:N       84   0% 12-30-2015 12:26 1a2d7e3f  mywebproc
      76  Defl:N       76   0% 12-30-2015 12:26 5b612a39  mywebproc.bat
--------          -------  ---                            -------
 9070813          8494856   6%                            25 files

Its important to spot that although mywebproc-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar was put in the lib subdirectory, the assembly process has carefully arranged to put mywar.war (named without a version suffix) in the base/webapps/ subdirectory. This is so the Java code that registers a .war into Tomcat has a fixed filename to refer to it by.

Note the inclusion of a couple of scripts (mywebproc and mywebproc.bat) to run the program. You can imagine more sophisticated versions that could be used as init-scripts.

The intent of this structure is that you simply unzip the file, and run the script.

In reality, the installation process or the start script is likely to need to add a context.xml into the META-INF/ subdirectory of the .war file. This file contains things such as database connection definitions, and is therefore likely to vary depending on the environment into which the application is deployed.

Usage

Now uses Java 11 (or later).

Usage :-

$ unzip mywebproc-0.1-SNAPSHOT-bin.zip
$ ./mywebproc

Point your browser at http://localhost:8080/mywar/ or https://localhost:8443/mywar/.

Copying

Feel free to copy, its public domain. Caveat Emptor.


The documentation is written and maintained by the Embedded Tomcat example author, Andy Key
andy.z.key@googlemail.com