webapp partitioning on tomcat

Question

I have a large monolithic webapp, and whenever I make changes to a particular section of the webapp I am forced to deploy the entire app.

I would like to break this down into smaller chunks based on functionality (e.g. In a Banking website - I want to seperate out informational stuff from the online banking functionality, so if I make a change to the online banking functionality, i just deploy that part)

The challenge here is the existence of certain common elements across the webapp, like the logged in user's session.

Any thoughts on the different ways in which the webapp partitioning could be done? Thanks.

Answer 1

OK, It seems to be possible, see the link

So separating the various parts:

Separate static content into one web-app that can be statically delivered via Apache.

Separate your distinct segments of the application.

Answer 2

From a programmer point of view: I wouldn't tear the application appart if the modules use common elements and runtime information like sessions. As soon as you have different webapps you have different class loaders and your applications won't "see" each other making synchronization and interoperability very hard.

I would rather suggest you use a framework which enables hot pluggable modules. For example an OSGI implementation like Equinox.