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Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 13:18:17 -0600
From: Jess Holle <jessh@ptc.com>
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To: Tomcat Developers List <tomcat-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: Tomcat 5's service.bat, etc.
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The service.bat and tomcat.exe in Tomcat 5 have a number of issues as I 
see it:

   1. The new tomcat.exe (aka procrun) does not seem to reliably route
      stdout and stderr to the specified files.
          * Compare JavaService (aka Tomcat 4.1.x's tomcat.exe) stdout
            and stderr treatment to procrun's.  JavaService captures all
            the startup stdout as well as System.out.println's, etc. 
            procrun does not.
   2. Tomcat 5 does not include any documentation on how to use procrun
      (or even that tomcat.exe is procrun).
   3. I have not managed to get procrun to target the "server" JVM (as
      opposed to the client) in any reliable fashion.
          * With JavaService this was achieved by targeting the
            appropriate jvm.dll.  The procrun docs say the same thing is
            possible, but this does not work.
   4. service.bat does not route as many arguments to procrun as what I
      for one route to JavaService -- and thus it provides less
      flexibility (especially with no documentation).
          * For JavaService I provide heap sizing, etc, parameters, as
            this is critical to any real use of Tomcat.
          * Having built in support for passing JPDA debug args to the
            JVM is also a must.
   5. service.bat does not provide any default handling of tools.jar.
          * By default the resulting service can't compile JSP pages.

Overall, service.bat and procrun feel like they're not ready for 
production use -- which is fine as long as that's understood by the user 
community.

Personally, JavaService and an Ant script to produce the right 
(enormous) command line for seem to do the trick nicely -- with Tomcat 
4.1.x and 5.0.x.

--
Jess Holle


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