Abort java webapp on startup

Question

My webapp is part of a larger EAR that is deployed into a websphere server. The server hosts number of other apps on the same virtual server. My webapp has some initialisation/health checks in a servletContextListener->contextInitialized method. I want to make the webapp unavailable if initialisation/health checks fail. What is a realiable way of doing this? Will throwing a RuntimeException from within contextInitialized suffice? Is the rest of the EAR still expected to be available? Thank you.

Answer 1

Throwing a RuntimeException will probably make only that servlet unavailable. A safer way might be to implement something like a Spring interceptor that will forward to an error page or something if the checks didn't pan out. That way, you don't need to prevent the app from loading, but can handle it more gracefully at run time.