War based deployment with Java application servers

To generate a nice war file from your application make sure you have the following dependency declared in your project's pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.ninjaframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>ninja-servlet</artifactId>
    <version>X.X.X</version>
</dependency>

Also make sure that ninja-standalone is NOT declared as dependency.

Then you can run…

mvn package

…and get a nice war file in the subfolder /target of your project. That war file is compatible with almost all war containers out there. Jetty and Tomcat are two of them, but you can also deploy to Glassfish and JBoss.

Make sure you ran "mvn ninja:run" at least one time. This will generate a unique secret in application.conf that will be used to sign your application's sessions.

Advanced deployment scenario

With Tomcat's hot deployment function you can simply take the war file produced by Ninja and drop it into the Tomcat's webapp folder. Tomcat automatically detects the new file, stops the old application and starts the new one.

The very same mechanism works nicely when Tomcat is running in a cluster configuration. Simply drop the new war file into the webapp folder and that Tomcat instance will tell all cluster Tomcat's about the file. Subsequently the cluster changes to that new version of your application.

You can easily automate that process by using the maven cargo plugin. That makes it really easy to get a simple Jenkins based continuous deployment up and running.

That's the power of following well proven standards. Ninja - and the apps you are building with Ninja - are standing on the shoulder of giants.