Fear and loathing in Java
2004-06-17 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearSpent most of the day yesterday fighting with Tomcat5 on Fedora Core 2 (or what would have been RedHat 11 if they hadn't changed their business model). Tomcat5 is the current version of the "official" Java servlet engine, and it's a nightmare. Unlike the Apache platform that it coexists uneasily with, it changes radically with every release. Somewhere between 4 and 5 it stopped supporting symbolic links outside its web application root, unless you re-enable them in a way that's almost totally undocumented.
To fix it, you have to add an element called
Sun seems to have a talent for making bad decisions. Java is full of them -- if there was a way to do something differently from the (almost always correct) way Smalltalk did it, Java's (and C++'s) designers did it differently. There's a good reason why I do most of my web programming in Perl.
To fix it, you have to add an element called
DefaultContext with attribute allowLinking="true" to the host element in server.xml. Most of what's in that file is a pretty well commented set of examples, but in order to find this one you have to look at the next-to-last section of the release notes to see that you need the attribute, and then go chasing through the (limited) documentation to figure out where to put it.Sun seems to have a talent for making bad decisions. Java is full of them -- if there was a way to do something differently from the (almost always correct) way Smalltalk did it, Java's (and C++'s) designers did it differently. There's a good reason why I do most of my web programming in Perl.
