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I have an application written with Struts2 and Spring for DI and I'm using Tomcat 6 as container. Assuming I have packaged the application as my-application.war after deployment on Tomcat I can access it through http://my-host/my-application.
When I delete the .war file, Tomcat's supposed to undeploy the application and according to here When I try the http://my-host/my-application I should get:

HTTP Status 404

but instead I get:

HTTP Status 503 - This application is not currently available

When I redeploy the application to same context path I get a weird exception:

Unable to instantiate Action, [ActionClass], defined for '' in 
namespace '/' Failed to convert value of type [MyClass] to required type 
[MyClass] for property 'myClass': no matching editors or conversion strategy 
found

in which ActionClass has a property myClass of type MyClass which is injected by Spring and by default is a singleton. It's weird because type of both objects is the same. I suspect the application don't get undeployed completely in the first place cause when I restart Tomcat the scenario will be repeated. I would appreciate any help on finding the possible cause of this.

doctrey
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1 Answers1

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Well I think I found the answer. As I guessed the problem was with the improper undeployment.

It seems that deploying and undeploying an application without restarting the tomcat is a tricky business. When you deploy your application Tomcat classloader loads the classes in of the application and once they're loaded it seems they won't be unloaded with undeployment. And constantly deploying and undeploying an application will cause a serious memory leak. This case is specially true with singletons since the remained version of object in JVM doesn't match the newly deployed class. Hence the error I got above.

The safe path seems to be restarting Tomcat each time you redeploy any application.
Sources helped me find these information:

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doctrey
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