Maintaining two versions of same application and giving choice to user to switch between the two!

I am trying to deploy a new version of a Java application (JSP/S开发者_如何学Goervlet) deployed over tomcat. This newer version is in Beta as of now and hence, I want to give users choice to switch to the older version which is more stable.

What is the best way to handle it?

You can deploy your wars on two separate paths, but then configure Tomcat to redirect to one of them depending on user. You probably can use a cookie for that.

I think that each application should be registered in server.xml under different URL. Now it is up to you how do you inform your users which URL is preffered. For example it could be

http://www.mycompany.com/myapp1/ or http://www.mycompany.com/myapp2/

From Tomcat's perspective these are 2 different applicaitons.

BTW to make things simpler you can just change the war file name, i.e. myapp1.war and myapp2.war. In this case just put these war files under /tomcat/webapps directory. They will be deployed automatically with URLs myapp1 and myapp2 respecively.