Just moved from Tomcat 5 to Tomcat 7 and having problems with deployment.
I intially deploy my application widget by copying widget.war into webapps, this works, Tomcat deploys and explodes the war.
The problem comes with when I want to make changes.
If I redeploy the war everything works, but because I am uploading the war to a remote server this can be quite slow. So if I am just changing one class I just copy the new class directly into the exploded folder structure, then shutdown and restart Tomcat but it has no effect.
I think I’ve worked out it is because the widget.war gets redeployed so my newer class get replaced by the older version of the class in the widget.war. So then I manually deleted the widget.war so it couldn’t get overwritten but then on shutdown/startup I have no widget folder at all. it disappears !
Why is this, this did not happen with Tomcat 5.
If you delete the .war file while tomcat is running it will also delete the exploded directory.
You may either first shutdown tomcat, delete the .war file and then start again or better, why not just unzip the .war file by hand into the webapps folder (but do not put the .war file in webapps).