Sebastian (and others interested in the topic)--
I completely agree that we should generally let Beehive devs and users consume various versions of Tomcat and Ant. We're just not there yet in the build / test infrastructure, though I don't think that it would be much work to make it possible.
In general, the third-party libraries consumed by Beehive seem to fall into three categories:
- libraries that are part of a Beehive distribution including:
- XMLBeans
- Velocity (used for codegen when compiling Controls)
- Log4j
- Struts and the associated Jakarta Commons libraries
- libraries Beehive uses and needs to control versions of but aren't in the distribution
- JUnit
- various HttpClient / HttpUnit / misc testing tools
- JDK 1.5
- libraries that Beehive needs to set baseline versions of but not directly control
- Ant (at least 1.6.2)
- Tomcat (at least 5.x)
APIs in the first category are really part of Beehive itself and the versions that ship with Beehive need to be controlled by Beehive devs. In some cases, these libraries are still under active development including XMLBeans v2 and Struts 1.2. As a result, these libraries will rev from time to time in order to consume new versions. And, these libraries can't easily be swapped out for another version (older or newer) of the same library.
APIs in the second category are those that Beehive uses for testing / documentation that are checked into the Beehive tree but don't ship as part of the distribution. The versions of these will be controlled by the owners of the tools that use them; for example, if we encounter a bug in Xalan 2.4.1 that prevents NetUI from generating the tag ref documentation, we'll need to consider upgrading. In addition, we'll need to rev the JDK as new versions of 1.5 / 5.0 are released by Sun.
The final set of software is that in question -- Ant and Tomcat. In general, I agree that Beehive devs (and users!) should be able to use varying versions of Ant and Tomcat. We may still need to set minimum versions for these -- for example, Ant 1.6.2 works with the <junitreport> task and JDK 1.5, which is important for NetUI devs. For Tomcat, Beehive requires a JSP 2.0 container but shouldn't mandate a specific point release of Tomcat.
In general, the use of JDK 1.5 is going to mandate updates of the JDK and some of the supporting software (like Ant). As we go along here, we'll gain stability in the libraries, but there will still be the occasional churn of things like XMLBeans and Struts as we consume and add new versions of libraries that ship with Beehive.
Hope that sheds some light on some thinking here; any other thoughts / comments?
Eddie
Sebastian Gozin wrote:
I think I agree with this. Is there a specific reason why we need to have the latest and greatest version of tomcat or ant? I have broadband so downloading large files isn't so much a problem for me. Still I know these kind of tools get new versions quite fast so I'm guessing you will get tired of updating beehive after 2, 3 times.
It would probably be easier if you let developers specify the location of their own tomcat and ant installation. Let them worry about the version to run. You can always make a mention in the README about what minimum version they should use.
I think we can already do this though by pointing ANT_HOME and CATALINA_HOME to a different installation.
Sebastian
Rahul wrote:
Just a few thoughts:
I think we should upgrade only if there are "strong" reasons to do that. I
understand there will be numerous bug fixes and improvements to Ant., Tomcat
and other external libs that we use, but the point is to baseline a version
for development(unless we are hitting a "show stopper" block). Of course,
developers should be able to use alternate versions of Ant , Tomcat...etc if
they like but the project should be built and test against what is "base
lined".
The other thing(and probably not a biggie for fellow developers with high
speed connections) are SVN updates.It takes ages to update libraries,
especially with a dialup (unfortunately i am on one !). I'd suggest that an
interested developer should be able to download the requisite libs by
himself and I think its faster (using a download manager) than svn and would
make getting Beehive sources quick !! A readme file could be added to the
project about getting requisite libs from URLs. OR the other thing can be to
place the project dependencies separate from the source and these can be
downloaded in case anyone does not wishes to get dependencies from different
URLs.
Cheers,
Rahul
----- Original Message ----- From: "Eddie O'Neil" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Beehive Developers" <beehive-dev@incubator.apache.org> Sent: Friday, August 06, 2004 8:22 AM Subject: Re: Tomcat upgrade (WAS: Ant upgrade?)
integration in the Controls runtime other than a dependency on basic servletI'll take care of this in the next day or two assuming there are no objections.
Kyle Marvin wrote:
NetUI tests should be good enough... there is no significant Tomcat
filter functionality for container integration.
-- Kyle
-----Original Message----- From: Heather Stephens Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 2:18 PM To: Beehive Developers Subject: Tomcat upgrade (WAS: Ant upgrade?)
Would anybody have time to give Tomcat 5.0.27 a test drive and see how
it goes?
At a minimum it seems we should run both checkin tests/DRTs and the
battery of Beehive-NetUI tests. Should we run anything in the control
test suite as well?
-----Original Message----- From: Ias [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 7:27 AM To: 'Beehive Developers' Subject: RE: Ant upgrade?
What about Tomcat? Its 5.0.27 stable version is now available.
Thanks,
Ias
-----Original Message----- From: Eddie O'Neil [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 3:18 PM To: Beehive Developers Subject: Re: Ant upgrade?
I'm doing this now. Will let everyone know when it's finished.
After that, you'll need to update your Ant install on your next
sync.
Eddie
Heather Stephens wrote:
Nobody raised objections. Eddie would you mind doing the honors?
-----Original Message----- From: Eddie O'Neil Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 5:05 PM To: Beehive Developers Subject: Re: Ant upgrade?
In smoke testing this just now, an "ant clean deploy
drt" runs fine on
1.6.2.
Eddie
Heather Stephens wrote:
Hey crew -
Ant 1.6.2 is available. (http://ant.apache.org/) Does anybody object to doing an upgrade from 1.6.1?
H.
