Playframework + Tomcat Deployment issue

Question

I am trying to deploy a web app developed in play framework in Tomcat. The first few times I tried, I got the following message in the Tomcat console,

INFO: validateJarFile(C:\Tomcat7\webapps\sandbox.war\WEB-INF\lib\geronimo-servlet_2.5_spec-1.2.jar) - jar not loaded. See Servlet Spec 2.3, section 9.7.2. Offending class: javax/servlet/Servlet.class

So I manually removed the geronimo-servlet_2.5_spec-1.2.jar from the play war file. And once that is done, I see the following success message,

13:56:43,571 INFO  ~ Starting C:\Tomcat7\webapps\sandbox.war\WEB-INF\application

13:56:43,618 INFO  ~ Application is precompiled
13:56:44,149 INFO  ~ Connected to jdbc:mysql://localhost/db?useUnicode=yes&ch   aracterEncoding=UTF-8&connectionCollation=utf8_general_ci
13:56:44,899 INFO  ~ Application 'play-sandbox' is now started !

When I try to access the application from IE using the url http://localhost:8080/play-sandbox I am getting a 404 that says "The requested resource (/play-sandbox/) is not available".

I am running this in Tomcat 7 and the tomcat logs are clear. I use

 play war play-sandbox -o sandbox.war

to generate the war

The questions are,

1. How do I prevent the geronimo-servlet_2.5_spec-1.2.jar conflict?

2. Why am I unable to view the app via browser in Tomcat deployment? Where as play run {app name} works all fine.

   The same war file seems working perfectly fine in glassfish server as well. I believe this has something to do with the context path of the playframework application or isolation of the application. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, Abi

Answer 1

First I had the same problem like you when I deployed a play webapp to Tomcat 7, but then I got it running:

1. Yes, you have to manually remove the geronimo-servlet_2.5_spec-1.2.jar library
2. The reason might be an additional error that has nothing to do with the first problem. Please look into the <tomcat>/logs/catalina.out log file and also into the <tomcat>/logs/localhost.<date>.log file! In my case it was a missing JDBC library. I added the missing library to the play applications /lib directory, recreated the war file, again removed the geronimo-servlet_2.5_spec-1.2.jar and after that my application worked under Tomcat 7.0.25

Answer 2

Have you tried an earlier version of Tomact? According to the deployment matrix, Play does not 'officially' support Tomact 7, so that may be part of the problem. See here http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.2.1/deployment

As for why the application works when you do play run appname and not when you deploy through tomcat, is that the deploment is completely different. Play is not a Java EE compliant framework. It chose not to go down the Servlet spec route, as it felt it was too complicated, bloated and restricted where they wanted to take Play. This is why you don't have things like the Session and other Java EE core functions.

Therefore, to get Play to work in a Servlet container, it is required to wrap the Play application in a wrapper that exposes the application as a Servlet compliant application, and move it all into a WAR file. You do however lose some of the features of a standard Play application.

The Play Devs, and I for that matter, would recommend always using the Play application server to get the most out of your application and to ease the deployment, if possible!