On 05/26/2011 08:37 PM, Greg Holmberg wrote:
[...] What I want may simply be outside the design target of PEAR files. My expectations of PEAR files were based on how other archive formats in Java work. JAR files, WAR files, etc. These can all be use in-place, without any re-writing of their contents. You can just refer to them, and the system can locate the things in them at run-time through relative paths, regardless of what directory they've been dropped into. In other words, there's no installation process for JAR files or WAR files. [...]
At least in Tomcat, WAR files actually get unzipped before use, and the UIMA SimpleRestServer also installs PEAR files on the fly. Using SimpleRestServer you actually have one WAR file which contains a PEAR file, and when you deploy it in Tomcat, it automatically unzips the WAR and then (I believe on first call to the service) installs the PEAR. The descriptor used in the WAR references the PEAR file directly.
I believe that WARs only get installed when they haven't been installed yet, and I would hope the same is true for the PEAR installation, so there's no overhead from installing on each run of the pipeline.
It still rewrites $main_root, etc., but it gets pretty close to a transparent use of PEARs. At least for UIMA-AS a similar deployment scheme would make sense, and one could substitute "install pear, adjust classpath, deploy pointing to pear descriptor" with simply "deploy pointing to pear file" which would be much nicer, as we could skip all the launch scripts we are currently creating. For other uses one might have to think more about automatically cleaning up the unzipped directory, etc.
Bye, Jens
