Re: JAVA_HOME policy

[Greg Wilkins <gregw@mortbay.com>]

It is really jasper (the JSP engine from jakarta) that needs
tools.jar.  Tomcat is just one of several servlet containers to
use jasper.

Note that jasper2 no longer directly uses tools.jar, as it uses
ant to do all it's compiling.  Thus whatever ant.jar needs to find
tools.jar is what jasper and hence tomcat needs.

So hopefully the tools.jar dependancy will soon be history.
Thus anything done to support it in the short term should clearly
be of a temporary nature.

cheers


Joe Phillips wrote:> On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 19:36, Ben Burton wrote:
> > Can't say much about the tools.jar issue; I don't know what it provides and
> > how standardised that is.
>
>
> I haven't delved too deeply into the bowels of JBOSS/Tomcat *yet* but as
> I understand it, it contains the java compiler.  
>
> Here's my understanding in a nutshell, I'm happy to be
> corrected/educated if I'm mistaken:
>
> The Sun java compiler is written in java.  javac is merely a front-end
> to loading and running the correct java code.
>
> Java Server Pages are basically HTML with Java sprinkled within.  JSP
> containers convert the JSP source to a servlet (.java file) and then
> compile the servlet to a .class file.  The servlet is then executed
> within the container.
>
> The compile step requires a java compiler.  Servlet containers I'm
> familiar with (Tomcat, jserv, JBOSS+tomcat) require an external
> compiler.  
>
> AFAIK, they depend on the Sun implementation.  I do not know about the
> standardization.  My guess is there is no standardization between JDK
> vendors.  It *seems* for Sun JDKs, at least the jarfile and class names
> seem consistant.  I've never had compiler-related problems running
> Tomcat across J2SDKs.
>
> -joe



--
Greg Wilkins<gregw@mortbay.com>             Phone/fax: +44 7092063462
Mort Bay Consulting Australia and UK.          http://www.mortbay.com