why can't I see the changes on my JSP pages?

xpucto · 07-27-2007, 04:56 PM

Hi!

I'm using eclipse 3 with the tomcat's plugin. When I make a change on a JSP page, I don't see any change on my browser even when I restart tomcat or make refresh. I'm totally a newbie regarding JSP, tomcat and eclipse. I guess I forgot something in the configuration, but I do not know what. thank you for any help.

b0uncer · 07-28-2007, 12:33 PM

I don't know about those programs you're using but here's something very basic you should take into account when playing around with browsers and modifying pages you view in them: most browsers hold some kind of cache, and try to load the pages you've viewed before from the cache to load them faster (in case the page sat on the opposite side of the Earth, behind crappy connections) if it thinks there are no changes; it could be that if you refresh the page very frequently, your browser just picks up a copy from the cache and displays that. Refreshing could also do a "meta refresh", not actually refreshing the whole page but just the visible parts. For example with php pages using meta refresh refreshes the page content and maybe some nice clock thing you've built there, but not all of the content; for example some information brought from a database trough the php code would not be visible until you did a *real* refresh.

In cases like this (you view a page you modify in a browser) I'd try to turn off caching, and make sure the whole page is re-fetched and executed from the server, not just some cache copy of it, or parts of the page.

Beyond that I can't say what it could be. If the changes are saved to a file and that file is read by your browser, there should be no problems.

xpucto · 08-11-2007, 06:51 AM

thanks for the answer, but I don't think that the browser is the problem. When I start others browsers they show the same thing. I looked at the file, and saw that ecplipse (or tomcat?) doesn't recompile the files that I change. I have to delete the old compiled ones, so that it compiles again.

joe262 · 05-23-2009, 07:17 AM

I am having the same dang problem.

it seems that the java class resulting from compiling the jsp stays in the 'work' directory, and the only way i have found to force tomcat to recompile the jsp is to delete that class file each and every time.

There has got to be a better way, i am sure there is, i just dont know what it is.

here is an excerpt from my /opt/tomcat6/conf/web.xml

Code:

     <servlet>
        <servlet-name>jsp</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet</servlet-class>
        <init-param> 
            <param-name>development</param-name>
            <param-value>true</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <init-param> 
            <param-name>modificationTestInterval</param-name>
            <param-value>0</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>keepgenerated</param-name>
            <param-value>false</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>xpoweredBy</param-name>
            <param-value>false</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <load-on-startup>3</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

as you can see i have development mode turned on, which is *supposed* to fix this. idk. any help would be appreciated. using Tomcat 6 on CentOS 5.something on an eapps VPS.

thanks,

Joe

joe262 · 05-23-2009, 07:46 AM

Ok. Never mind. It is working now : )

Solution was to add: reloadable="true"
in the server.xml <Host> heading.

joe262 · 05-23-2009, 07:53 AM

Sorry, on second thought that didnt fix it. I only thought it did.
Grrrrr : (

joe262 · 05-23-2009, 06:54 PM

Ok, turns out that the FTP client i was using was failing to update the modification time on the jsp files. Fixed that and now it works. : )