[Paperclips-discuss] Server.xml boot class (was: Re: CVS Trouble)

[Nic Ferrier]

>>> "Gokul  Singh" <address@hidden> 19-Jul-01 10:03:56 AM >>>

Nic said:
   I think it would be cool if the config file also allowed 
   overloading of the deployment descriptor of individual 
   webapps.

Gokul replied:
   I am not sure why is this required. The only reason that I 
   can think of is if the war file is a signed jar file, then one 
   can not customize the web.xml in the war file.
   Why exactly are you looking for such a functionality?

It'd be cool because the server.xml is the chief weapon for
deployers.

Here's a common example: you want to deploy one webapp mapped as 2
different paths on one server. Each different path needs it's own CSS
file.

The server.xml can be used to create 2 context mappings to the same
webapp, overload the web-app in the context to specify the location of
the CSS file, either with an init-parameter or a path mapping.

It's very common to have to change init parameters on live systems.

Lastly, war files delivered by a development team should be
immutable.



   Do we need to pass the snippet unparsed. Maybe we can 
   parse it and give it in a parsed format to the WebApp.

Good idea! That would mean extracting the contents of the web-app DTD
and making it part of the contents of a server.xml DTD.

I like it.

I was thinking about having an unparsed server.xml, but a parsed one
would be cool since it would allow better error checking (and people
make lots of mistakes with server.xmls).



    or may be the boot class passes a hashtable to the 
    WebApp for overriding the setting in the DD.

Could do. I'm not sure I care how it's done. I think it would be
easier for the boot class if it gets to reuse the parsing inside
WebApp. 

Maybe pass in a SAXReader to ddInit()?

But I don't really mind how it's done. I just think it'd be less
cluttered that way (web-app parsing is large).



   Should we start with the overloading functionality or 
   the configuration of paperclips as such.

I think the configuration. If you have a boot class that reads a
server.xml we can work on adding the overriding later.


Nic said:
   It is quite a lot of xml parsing though (for which the 
   classpathx xml parser should be used).

Gokul replied:
   Right.. but is that in place..

Not sure what you mean. The Classpathx xml stuff is here:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/classpathx/jaxp/

You could also use aelfred which is in the Paperclips CVS right now
(aelfred is an earlier version of what's in classpathx-jaxp).


Nic