If you want *.jsp files to be served directly from your favorite Apache (2.x) webserver (port 80) rather than from Tomcat's built in webserver at port:8080 follow the instructions below.

I assume you have Apache (2.x) as well as Tomcat installed. Make sure Tomcat works by itself by requesting the samples at http://localhost:8080/examples/jsp.

4 steps involved:

1. Download mod_jk.so from http://tomcat.apache.org/download-connectors.cgi/. There's different versions for different platforms. Download the appropriate one to your Apache/modules dir then make sure to rename it mod_jk.so.

2. Go to the Apache config directory (where httpd.conf is located) and create a file named workers.properties containing the next few lines:

3. The above defines a so called worker named worker1 on port 8009 (where Tomcat gets it's forwards). Apache httpd must forward all *.jsp requests to this worker. So let's edit httpd.conf to get that done (edit the file paths to match your configuration).

4. Restart Apache and there you go. You could copy the examples directory from tomcat/webapps to your Apache webroot to see if everything is OK: you should be able to run the examples at http://localhost/examples/jsp (so without the port 8080 part).

All this and more can be found at http://tomcat.apache.org/connectors-doc/

Running Tomcat alongside Coldfusion (Apache webserver)

When there's a Coldfusion server installed the above needs some more tuning. That's because Coldfusion by default handles all *.jsp requests, so Tomcat won't even know about you requesting jsp pages. Coldfusion (JRun) may be able to handle jsp very well, however if you have a Standard License installed then upon requesting a jsp page CF very kindly informs you that you are trying to access a restricted feature. You must upgrade to Enterprise Edition to enjoy this feature.

That's a cool suggestion perhaps, but we'll stick to Tomcat anyway. All we have to do is tell Coldfusion not to handle jsp requests anymore (or rather: stop telling Coldfusion to handle jsp requests).

2 steps involved:

1. On installation Coldfusion configures Apache to have a whole range of file types to be handled by the CF application server.

Open Apache's httpd.conf then look for Loadmodule jrun_module. Check the lines below. Set JRunConfig Ignoresuffixmap true and remove the '.jsp' file type from Addhandler. Leave the rest as it is.

2. Restart Apache and get yourself a beer.

When several Ajax controls are spread throughout an interface it can be hard to keep them all synchronized with each other and the data they represent. Say your GUI shows a list of addresses in a CFDIV. Elsewhere in the GUI there's a CFSELECT showing addresses. Now if you delete an address from the list asynchronously, so that the CFDIV is reloaded without reloading the entire page, then the zelectbox must reflect these changes as well.

How would you tell the selectbox it has to update it's contents?

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Ever wanted a real combobox in your HTML application? A combobox is a select box in which you can type text to filter out the options. Since such an element does not exist in HTML, here's one emulated.

Data is loaded asynchronously only after so many characters are typed, so this makes for excellent use with result sets that would otherwise create too large option lists. You make sure the bind url doesn't return too many options, otherwise increase the minimum number of required characters.

When it's used to display a field of an existing record you can pre-populate the list with one option/value pair.

Here we use CF's built in data binding, so you must use CFForm, but on the other hand there's no line of javascript you have to write yourself.