RequestDispatcher forward between Tomcat instances

Question

I have a scenario where I have single entry point Servlet and further Servlets that requests are forwarded to that undertake heavy processing.

I am looking at options to

Answer 1

You could distribute it over webapps in a clustered Tomcat environment and add crossContext="true" to the <Context> element of the webapps in question. Here's an extract of Tomcat's Context Configuration Reference:

crossContext

Set to true if you want calls within this application to ServletContext.getContext() to successfully return a request dispatcher for other web applications running on this virtual host. Set to false (the default) in security conscious environments, to make getContext() always return null.

This way you can obtain the desired RequestDispatcher as follows:

RequestDispatcher dispatcher = getServletContext().getContext(name).getRequestDispatcher(path);