I’m on vacation and I’m writing my first technical post. That’s unfortunate 🙂
So this will be for all you lads and gentleman (and ladies) struggling in the world of Java and its ecosystem. Have you ever deployed Java apps on IIS? Well If I am the man to be consulted I’ll never choose that solution. But of course here comes the project managers, the Active Directory stuff and so on, when you have such climate you must bend yourself and do your best.
I have the following scenario: couple of different Java apps deployed on Tomcats. Well that doesn’t sound so bad there are easy service wizard installs of Apache Tomcat on Windows, easier deployment of the same so I will not really bother with such a trivial things, I hope you can do that by yourself.
Where is the problem? Well there a plural applications and one open port for the outside world. That’s right, the standard HTTP 80 port.
Simple thing we should do is to port forward and url rewrite the addressing applications.
Before finding this solution I was aware of one way on connecting Java container with IIS, through ISAPI and JK. But that requires changing Windows registry, defining couple of configuration files, using isapi_redirect , in other words messy and hardly-working solution. There are couple of guides on the net, just google it if you want to try them. The next solution is clean, simple and productive.
The IIS I’m working on is version 7.5. That is nice because the fellow Microsoft guys introduce a new solution to us, ARR. The use of this module here is to be set up to work as proxy server and that is exactly what we need in this situation.
After installing this extension on the server machine (I’m working on Windows Server 2008) next thing is to enable proxy server. Follow this steps:
- Open the IIS Manager and in the IIS Group there should be Application Request Routing Cache module showing up. Select it.
- So here we are. In the Action menu choose – Server Proxy Settings .
- For the following scenario this set up will work : Enable proxy = true, checked keep-alive, time-out by will, reverse rewrite host headers in response checked. Apply the changes and proceed.
Half work done. Next thing that we need is the URL rewrite feature. Install it. (Here I don’t mention anything about the features and roles that need to be installed to make IIS working. I think that is just not-needed information here. You have the wizards in Computer Management, use them).
Well I hope you got URL rewrite working. That’s where we will define the rewrites.
Lets imagine. Two Tomcat installation with just one application per server.
Installation folders: D:\Tomcat1 , D:\Tomcat2 . We need only the HTTP connectors, so in $tomcat_home\conf\server.xml you can comment out the AJP connectors.
Don’t forget while installing the Tomcats, to configure them on different ports. Example :
 <Connector port=”8080″ protocol=”HTTP/1.1″ proxyName=”www.example.com” proxyPort=”80″
              connectionTimeout=”20000″
              redirectPort=”8443″ />
 <Connector port=”8081″ protocol=”HTTP/1.1″ proxyName=”www.example.com” proxyPort=”80″
              connectionTimeout=”20000″
              redirectPort=”8443″ />
You ask yourself why I have put proxyName and proxyPort here. Well they are not required but since we want this application to work for outside world as I mentioned , you don’t want Java calls like getServerName() to return localhost and local port. We want ajax and applets to work. This way we ensure the right host name and port are returned.
Installation ports: Tomcat1 on port 8080, Tomcat2 on port 8081. Installed apps: on Tomcat1 app1, on Tomcat2 app2.
So we can open the deployed applications on following urls : http://localhost:8080/app1 and http://localhost:8081/app2 .
It’s time to finalize the installations. We want the apps to be accessible on the following urls http://www.example.com/app1 and http://www.example.com/app2 .
This is where URL rewrite comes in play and that’s where we do the things explicitly. You can define URL rewrite rules in the main configuration but I prefer creating new site bound to port 80 and defining it there. Add new site with name exampe.com and for physical path put D:\ or whatever you want for your local situation, this is just example. That’s the place where web.config file will be created and everything that we do in the IIS manager will be mapped in configuration file, which is an xml configuration file the IIS use.
- In the new site, IIS group, open URL rewrite.
- Add new rule from the actions menu. Choose blank rule.
- Configurations : Name – Tomcat1 rule, requested url -> matches the pattern , simple pattern: (app1.+) , ignore cases true, action type – rewrite , rewrite url: http://localhost:8080/{R:0}
- Apply , make another rule for the other tomcat and just change the name, pattern and the port.
- Restart IIS and you got it.
Just to get things straight. URL rewrite allow us to filter by some rule patterns, conditions and replace server variables. We just defined simple rewrite rule. That’s why we use {R:0} . It simple variable for the first rule pattern. There can be more of course , the format is {R:N} , where N is from 0 to 9.
This was very simple. I hope this will give you some clues how can you manipulate this modules to do more complex stuff. And you are not limited to use only Java servers of course. Any socket listening on any port can work.
I wish you happy days, for the end a reward from me
Groggy Man Reads The Man 