Session Problems

I'm having a problem with my sessions.  I'm using Tomcat 5.0.24 on Windows.  Here is the nature of the problem:

I have a chat application whose context can be added to different web sites as /chat.  For example www.domain.com/chat.

In my chat application, I preper to create a single ChatServlet object per session.  Here is my code at the JSP side:

ChatServlet cs;
if (session.getAttribute("ChatServlet") == null) {
  cs = new ChatServlet();
  session.setAttribute("ChatServlet", cs);
} else {
  cs = (ChatServlet) session.getAttribute("ChatServlet");
}

On my Tomcat, here is the host section of my server.xml.

<Host name="www.domain.com" debug="0" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">
  <Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger" directory="logs"  prefix="DOMAIN_" suffix=".log" timestamp="true"/>
            
  <Context path="/chat" docBase="chat" debug="0" caseSensitive="false" />
  <Context path="" docBase="domain/web" debug="0" caseSensitive="false" />
</Host>

I DO NOT need the crosscontext="true" attribute in the context tag.  I tried doing this, but it didn't solve my problem.

Here is what happens:

I start a new browser window.  Go to www.domain.com/chat.  Everything works perfectly fine.  I have a single session, and the same ChatServlet object is carried through out the session.

Then I close the browser window.  I make sure that the session no longer exists.  Go to www.domain.com (which is the default context).  Browse domain.com without any problems.  However, when I click on the Chat link (which of course points to www.domain.com/chat), a new session (hence a ChatServlet object) is created each time a jsp page from /chat is loaded.  This screws up my chat application.

It doesn't matter for me to have the same session for both contexts.  Context / and /chat don't need to share anything even though it wouldn't matter if they did share the same session, too.  However, I definetely need to have a single session for the entire /chat context.

I hope my explanation is clear.  Please help! :)Start Free Trial