Today I reached a significant milestone with Impala. I successfully deployed and ran the Impala as a war file with reloadable modules, in Tomcat. Modules are placed as jars in the folder /WEB-INF/modules.
This is a big step forward. Until now, Impala has been developed and deployed in Eclipse or using ANT and an embedded Jetty runner. That's great for development, but for production, a war file is much more convenient - just having a single file which can be dropped into a web container is much more deployment friendly than having to set up a special folder on the target machine which has a structure which mirrors the development environment.
A war deployment option was one of the main features which stands in the way of a public release. There's quite a bit of tidying up to do in the way that the build/packaging process works, but it's fair to say that we're now a big step closer to a first public release of Impala.
