Advantages of using tomcat manager app over copy-to-webapp directory

I have been pondering a lot lately over, why should one use tomcat manager to deploy/undeploy wars to your server?

What are the advantages/disadvantages of the same over simply copy-it-to-webapps-folder approach, and delete-it-from-webpass-folder approach??

Also, are t开发者_开发知识库here any other advantages regarding cleanup process by tomcat , when a war is deleted? i.e is the process of cleanup different, when a dev deletes a .war , and when he undeploys a webapp using the manager??

Also, would the process be different If I use ant with TCD?

Some light on this would be really helpful.

Also, are there any other advantages regarding cleanup process by tomcat , when a war is deleted? i.e is the process of cleanup different, when a dev deletes a .war , and when he undeploys a webapp using the manager??

internally it does the same thing. just it provides UI so that we can easily and|or easily & remotely, do the deployment/undeployment and other admin stuff

One obvious advantage of using the manager is that with it, you do not need to grant OS-level privileges to everyone who manages the applications. You can just grant access to the manager UI and allow users to start / stop / deploy / undeploy applications from there, but they will still gain no access to the underlying OS (at least not anything the Tomcat user does not have access to).

It of course depends on your situation if the above is significant or meaningless. Other than that, the browser UI of the manager is easier to use for some people.

I use Tomcat Manager (TM) together with Ant, so my comment applies to this combination.

One of the conveniences for me is that by using Ant/TM I can not only deploy, but also undeploy or update webapps without restarting. I don't think this is possible to do by simply deleting .war or exploded directory.