[Aimmath-developers] server.xml does not need to be modified

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

Following a suggestion by Manolis I tried to install AIM without moving it
into the ROOT directory and without messing with the file
/tomcat/conf/server.xml. I was surprised how easy that was. Here is the
procedure on Windows 2000, but I assume it is similar on other systems:

1) Install Tomcat (I used the latest stable release 4.1.24 and it comes with
a very posh automatic installation program)
2) check out the AIM module from SourceForge into Tomcat's webapps folder
   (by default this will create a subfolder named AIM but you can choose a
different name, for example the command
       cvs checkout -d MYAIM AIM
    will put AIM into the directory MYAIM)
3) remove the write protection from the files zonefoot.html zonehead.html
adminfoot.html adminhead.html in /MYAIM/WEB-INF/root (see
    previous message)
3) comment out the lines in Servlet.mpl that overwrite
/tomcat/conf/server.xml (To find these search for "file1 :=" in
Servlet.mpl).
4) do the usual changes to ManualConfig.mpl and add the lines
     Config['TomcatPort'] := 8080:
     Config['TomcatContext'] := "MYAIM":
     Config['WebAppDir'] := "C:\\Tomcat\\webapps\\MYAIM":
     Config['WebDir'] := "C:\\Tomcat\\webapps\\MYAIM":
     Config['HostName'] := "144.32.100.134": (this one you will have to
change of course)
4) Start Maple in the directory /MYAIM/WEB-INF/maple and read in the files
AutoConf.mpl, Servlet.mpl, and Make.mpl
     as in the standard installation procedure.
5) start Tomcat using  Start -> Programs -> Apache Tomcat 4.1 -> Start
Tomcat
6) point the browser to http://144.32.100.134:8080/MYAIM (again you will
have to put in your own address of course)

I was surprised that I did not have to tell Tomcat about AIM. Apparently
Tomcat saw that there was a nice web.xml in the directory MYAIM/WEB-INF and
that was enough.

The advantage of the above is that I now have two AIM systems running
simultaneously on my machine, one in the subfolder AIM and one in MYAIM, one
to serve the students and one for me to play around with (develop ;-) ).

Can some of you try whether this works for them as well? If this works
without problems for several of us then we should think about taking out the
server.xml stuff permanently from Servlet.mpl. Was this overwriting of
server.xml perhaps necessary only in the older versions of Tomcat? Perhaps
Neil can answer this question?

Gustav