HOWTO: Parallel deployment on tomcat 7
News broke out recently that Tomcat 7 supports parallel deployment . This feature allows one to deploy a newer version of a web application while maintaining the current one online. The net effect is that new users will be connected to the newest version while already connected users will not be kicked out. Neat uh? One could even have more than two versions online at any time (if that was necessary). The details of how this works are explained in the Context Container documentation . Only it doesn't really tell you how to use it, it tells you how they implemented instead. So what do you have to do to take advantage of this great feature? First of all upgrade to Tomcat 7 (which btw requires Java 6), but you knew that already, didn't you? Then simply adopt the following naming strategy when deploying apps: name your war file mygreatapp## version .war (note the ## used to mark the beginnning of the version substring) where version can actually be anything (it is ma...