Tomcat 6.x … doing it the right way!
Some days ago I posted a blog entry about using Glassfish v2 EJBs with the Tomcat. At this moment I thought that I solved the problems, but last week we were setting our testing evironment on a Debian Linux box and the problems reoccured.
At this moment I thought of a glitch in the server setup but some nagging hours later I realized that my so clever solution was a dirty hack. Which works in a Microsoft Windows environment, but refuses to work on in a Linux environment.
Ok, I have to confess, that I wasn't really happy with my first solution in the end. Renaming JARs to provide the correct order of class loading always leaves a bad taste. But at that moment I was happy, no other solution was in sight and I had absolutly no time.
An ETag is not about aliens
So what is this ETag thing. I am working since 1998 in the web business but I came across ETags some weeks ago when some of my customers starting to worry about their perfomace. Don't get me wrong, out apllication worked - as always - fine, but some pages where slower as the equivalent pages at the websites of their competitors. We checked our monitoring data, it's always good to know of the webstite performed on yesterday, yesterweek or yestermonth, but were unable to find some issues. So we went from the server to the protocol and the client and checked some static and dynamic pages. As I was taking a closer look at a static webpage I stumbled over a HTTP header which I didn't know: ETag.