Weblog

Tuesday November 15, 2005

Remote Web tier on Tomcat Today's post describes how to setup web tier that communicates with ejb tier that is deployed on different server. This scenario is very often since App server is in local network behind firewall and Web server is located in DMZ (demilitarized zone) or in Internet. I used Tomcat 5.0.28 as web server and App server 8.1. I hope that the configuration could be simple adopted for other Tomcat's version as well.
I assuming that you have existing application that consists of web module and EJB module. Of course, all facade beans should have remote interfaces. Deploy these modules on appropriate servers.
Copy j2ee.jar and appserv-rt.jar to $TOMCAT_DIR/common/lib. Note, I should modify appserv-rt.jar, the App server's jar includes org.catalina, org.commons, org.coyote, .... packages. Tomcat doesn't start with these packages. Delete packages org.* from the jar. Don't modify original library.
Change catalina50.sh or catalina50.bat startup scripts, add the line that sets up name for EJBs lookup

     export JAVA_OPTS="-Dorg.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialHost=hostName -Dorg.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialPort=3700"