Using the Application Server Control

All settings in orion-web .xml can also be managed using the Application Server Control (ASC). This proves to be a great instrumentation tool. You don't need to redeploy your application.

Caution 

If the change you're making is permanent, it's a good idea to make the change in orion-web.xml before or immediately after making the change to the running application. Don't forget that once an application is redeployed, the changes made to orion-web.xml using the ASC will be overwritten by the new orion-web.xml descriptor.

Bring up the ASC by navigating to http://localhost:1810 and logging in as ias_admin with the password that you've specified during the installation. You'll see an overview of installed components . Click the instance you used to deploy the application, click the Applications tab, and then click the sample application. This will bring up a page that looks like what's shown in Figure 10-11.

Figure 10-11: ASC displaying the sample application

Let's try out something that can be immediately visible: You'll modify the context-param "publisher," which is defined in web.xml and then overwritten in orion-web.xml . The current value is Apress . To change a context-param , click the web module name , sample, then click Environment and change the value simply by typing in a different value, as shown in Figure 10-12.

Figure 10-12: Changing context parameters in ASC

If you've tried out every example in this chapter, then after applying the changes and going to http://localhost/sample/foo.html , the browser will show Foobar, 0, published by APRESS, version v2, Long live bytecode! .

At this point it's not necessary to go through the ASC in more detail. Detailed coverage of ASC is provided in Chapters 16, 17, and 18. We simply wanted to point out that anything you can set in orion-web.xml you can also set using the ASC.

Now that you've read this chapter, the best thing you can do is to write your own web application and try out all the settings in orion-web.xml that you find interesting.