You
can create separate server instances, each with its own ColdFusion
applications; each application then has its own ColdFusion and J2EE
server resources. In this configuration, you typically have a single
external web server with multiple server instances on one computer,
and separate virtual hosts (or sites) for each server instance.
Note: Like ColdFusion, other J2EE application
servers provide equivalent capabilities, and most of the concepts
apply when deploying the ColdFusion J2EE configuration on those
J2EE servers.
Running independent applications this way has several advantages,
including the following:
Errors at the levels of the ColdFusion application or
the Tomcat server do not affect any other ColdFusion applications.
You
can support multihomed servers, where a single web server supports multiple
IP addresses or domain names, such as www.mycompany.com and services.anothercompany.com,
each running from a separate web root. For more information, see Multihoming.
Note: Installing and Using ColdFusion describes creating
multiple server instances on a single computer. To create multiple
server instances on separate computers, each computer requires a
separate license of ColdFusion Enterprise Edition.
To achieve complete application isolation, you use web-server-specific
functionality to create a separate website for each application.
Web servers have different terminology for this concept. For example,
in IIS, you define separate websites (available in Windows server
editions only) and in Apache, you create multiple virtual hosts.
These instructions apply when running ColdFusion in the multiserver
configuration. The principles apply when running ColdFusion on other
J2EE application servers. However, not all J2EE application servers
integrate with external web servers. For more information, see Multihoming.
These
instructions assume that you deploy each application at a named
context root, which enables users to access CFM pages by specifying http://hostname/context-root/pagename.cfm.
If other web applications are running in the server instance, each
web application must use a different context root.
For example, with a context root of cf, users
access CFM pages by specifying http://hostname/cf/pagename.cfm.
For more information on using a context root, see Installing ColdFusion.
Note: Although cf is the context
root, it does not relate to your web application directory structure.
