Connecting to PostgreSQL from Tomcat 7 on OpenShift

I'm using a free OpenShift account to host a small site, and had some trouble getting a connection to my PostgreSQL cartridge from my Tomcat 7 (JBoss EWS 2.0) cartridge. As often happens, the act of asking the question made me think of a few additional solutions to explore, but I ended up posting the question then heading to OpenShift's support page to send a question. Like StackOverflow, OpenShift's contact page starts suggesting articles when you type in a subject, and that's how I found the article that describes their JNDI DataSources exposed by Tomcat.

Forwarding traffic from Apache2 to Tomcat on Ubuntu

I have several Java webapps running under Tomcat that I wanted to be accessible through Apache2 running on port 80 on my home server. It turns out that it's pretty easy to do, though I didn't find an example anywhere that included all the steps I needed to take to get it working. Most of what I need to know was at this blog post.

First of all, here are the exact versions I'm running. I wouldn't be surprised if there are newer major versions; I need to upgrade the server.

• Apache2: 2.2.11
• Tomcat: 6.0.18

We're going to proxy traffic back and forth between Apache2 and Tomcat using Apache JServ Protocol. Apache ships with support through the module proxy_ajp, and Tomcat has a built-in connector.

GWT with RPCs on Tomcat 6

The Tomcat Security Manager has bitten me again.
I'm liking GWT development with the Eclipse plugin. I ran through the StockWatcher tutorial, added RPCs and it was working great in hosted mode, but when I deployed it on Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu 9.04, RPCs failed with the following:

The call failed on the server; see server log for details

OpenGrok on Ubuntu w/ Tomcat6

A friend of mine turned me onto OpenGrok a couple of years ago, so when we migrated from CVS to SVN at work I set it up on one of our dev webapp servers to give my team a way to search the repository. The thing I like the most about it is that it does syntax highlighting of your source so you can easily browse without checking a project out into an IDE. There are a lot more advanced features, but that's the one I appreciate the most since I do a lot of browsing of legacy code.

Tomcat6 fails to deploy a war file

Tomcat can get confused. Today I dealt with an issue where Tomcat just wouldn't deploy a war file on one of our webapp servers, so the app was unavailable. The first symptom of the problem was a Tomcat 404 page.

type Status report
message /mywar/default
description The requested resource (/mywar/default) is not available.