We've got a new requirement that basically works out to running two independent applications on a single instance of Cocoon. We currently run with JBoss, with everything packaged up into a single EAR that can be hot deployed into JBoss. With the new requirements we need to be able to deploy new versions of both apps without redeploying the other app at the same time.
Basically the components we have to worry about are: - Cocoon (currently a WAR within an EAR); - Our EJBs which would now likely be deployed independently (still as a EAR?); - Our two apps (one of which is currently deployed as a JAR within the EAR). I suspect that this means we have to run expanded within JBoss and loose the convenience of just being able to drop a EAR in and out of JBoss to redeploy Cocoon? I'm not sure that we could hot deploy the JAR files inside of the expanded Cocoon instance? If we've got to shut down and restart Cocoon each time we redeploy a JAR we could probably live with it. The alternative that I suspect might be possible but take some development would be to leverage some of the JBoss hot deploy capabilities. Essentially, you'd need to somehow update the Cocoon class loader class path info with the location of the JARs as they were deployed by JBoss. If I understand correctly this would be a case of adding a Mbean to Cocoon that would subscribe to the correct JBoss deployment messages and use the information in them to update the running instance of Cocoon. Once you've got this working you might also want to do the same thing for the sitemap; run independent sub-sitemaps from within each JAR; you'd have to update the Cocoon path information so that it can find the directory locations that JBoss creates when it dynamically deploys the JARs. We could likely survive with separating the libraries from the web files and leaving the web files directly inside Cocoon, but packaging everything inside a single JAR sure would be nice... I know this is essentially recreating what people want to do with Cocoon 2.2, but we need this capability now. I don't expect that many people here have enough knowledge of the JBoss internals to comment on that side of things, but how about the Cocoon side? Basically I need two things: 1) someway to update the Cocoon class loader class path info dynamically; 2) someway to reconfigure the Cocoon sitemap to move the location of a sub-sitemap dynamically. Anyone know if these both or either would be possible? Peter Hunsberger
