Reload of Struts-config file

In earlier versions of Struts (v1.0), there was a ReloadAction that allowed us to reload the struts-config file from disk without reloading the web application or restarting the server.

But since Struts 1.1, this Action was removed. So it was no longer possible to reload the struts-config file using any in-built capabilities. I could not understand why this had been done. Finally a post by Craig R. McClanahan (founder of Struts) resolved all doubts:

ReloadAction is not supported in 1.1 for two reasons:

* It never did let you reload everything that you would really want to -- particularly changed classes -- so many people ended up having to reload the webapp anyway.

* Not supporting ReloadAction lets Struts avoid doing synchronization locks around all the lookups (like figuring out which action to use, or the detination of an ActionForward) so apps can run a little faster.

But under ordinary conditions, if we reload the webapp, then all sessions are lost - atleast that's what I thought; but I was wrong. Looks like the session is kept alive, but all session objects are destroyed unless they implement the 'Serializable' interface. I found this out from another post of Craig.

You can avoid webapp reload problems (which will likely be requiredfor *any* server, not just Tomcat) by following a couple of simple rules:

* For session attributes, make sure that they implement java.io.Serializable (and that any classes used in instance variables are also Serializable). Tomcat 4+, at least, will save and restore these sessions and their attributes for you.

* For context attributes, make sure that your webapp startup procedures properly restore anything that needs to be there. For a servlet 2.3 or later container, the proper way to do this is with a class that implements ServletContextListener, regsitered in a element in your web.xml file.

Proper application architecture will avoid any reloadability problems.