Spring Boot Service works locally but not remotely

Question

I'm trying to create a very simple RESTful Web Service with Spring Boot to perform NLP to the content passed as a parameter. You can find it on my GitHub .

For some reason, I can't deploy it to my Tomcat container in my home server as a WAR ( see here ), therefore I decided at least to try to set it up as a runnable JAR.

If I run it on my development machine by invoking:

java -jar -Xss32M -Xmx8G -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+UseStringDeduplication ClearWS-0.1.0.jar

it works like a charm. If I point my browser to http://localhost:8888/process?content=This%20is%20a%20test. , I get the expected JSON:

{ "id": 1,
  "sentences": [
      { "start": 0,
        "end": 0,
        "content": "This is a test.",
        "tokens": [
          { "start": 0, "end": 4, "index": 0, "text": "This", "posTag": "DT", "chunkTag": "NP", "lemma": "this" },
          { "start": 5, "end": 7, "index": 1, "text": "is", "posTag": "VBZ", "chunkTag": "VP", "lemma": "be" },
          { "start": 8, "end": 9, "index": 2, "text": "a", "posTag": "DT", "chunkTag": "NP", "lemma": "a" },
          { "start": 10, "end": 14, "index": 3, "text": "test", "posTag": "NN", "chunkTag": "NP", "lemma": "test" },
          {"start": 14, "end": 15, "index": 4, "text": ".", "posTag": ".", "chunkTag": ".", "lemma": "." } ],
        "size": 5 
      } ]
}

Now, I've moved the ClearWS-0.1.0.jar file to my home server and there I started it with the same command as above: no error messages. Locally (via localhost:8888), everything is still working perfectly. If I try to use it remotely, however, it doesn't work: after some time the browser tells me that my attempt to connect has failed.

That home server machine has a NATed address that doesn't change often, so I can hook it using no-ip.com and access it anyway. Notice that my other J2EE services deployed to Tomcat container are perfectly reachable and usable remotely. I thought it might be the embedded Tomcat conflicting with the stand-alone one, so I shut the latter down but still I can't reach ClearWS-0.1.0 .

I'm starting to think that Spring understand that I still don't fully trust it, so it fails on me on purpose... Out of the joke, can anybody with a better understanding of Spring and networks help me to sort this problem out? Thanks in advance.

---

Solution: I simply forgot to forward port 8888... Once added that configuration to my router, I was able to remotely use the service. Now I'd like to be able to deploy it in my existing Tomcat container... any idea?

Answer 1

If you really want to deploy it to a tomcat container, you need to create a war file as specified in the Spring Boot documentation . It mostly involves setting the maven packaging as a war. If your tomcat container is 6.0 or less, you would need to write a web.xml, otherwise you will to provide a SpringBootServletInitializer .

Personally, I don't see any benefit to running within a container these days. The movement in the java world now is for embedded servlet conatiners, which makes it much easier to run in the cloud or in a container like docker.