On Oct 11, 2005, at 4:37 PM, Dave Colasurdo wrote:



David Jencks wrote:
On Oct 11, 2005, at 2:18 PM, Dave Colasurdo wrote:
Quite frankly, I'm not sure I see the value of having multiple web containers simultaneously active within geronimo. Has anyone heard of a use case or user that is asking for this support?
I don't think there is any practical use for it outside of experimenting with both web containers at once. It also makes running the tck much easier.

IMHO, I suspect the vast majority of users will choose a single web container (at build or install time) and stick with it. If future requirements dictate a switch to a different container, then laying down a new installation doesn't seem unreasonable. In fact, Geronimo doesn't currently even support incremental maintenance. I would think the use case for non-destructive upgrade would be much more prevalent than changing internal components on the fly.

While simultaneous active web containers would be a technical feat, I'm really not sure the overhead and added confusion to users are worth the payoff.. My $.02
I prefer to keep this as standard at this point to ensure that our architecture remains clean enough to support it. I look forward to the installer being sophisticated enough to be able to include the correct components for only one web container. At the moment, it includes all components and only starts selected ones.

If there is no immediate practical use for it outside of TCK testing, wouldn't it be beneficial to the users (who are hopefully flocking to the newly certified J2EE server :>) ) if the default behavior was more inline with their expectations rather than confuse them with behavior that is somewhat confusing and that they will likely not be leveraging?

The changes to the installer seem like a reasonable plan. How about users that download the binary zip/tar images? Shouldn't they also have a simple default way to utilize only one web container. It seems this is what most users would want. It appears that the current M5 default behavior is starting both web containers..

Well, what do you suggest? At the moment the way to switch to a single web container is to copy 2 text files over 2 other text files. Instructions are in the M5 release notes. The alternative to starting both web containers by default is to start neither: we can't play favorites. We don't yet have a maintainable way of building 2 entirely separate distributions. I hope we can get there by 1.0, but it's going to take a substantial revision of our assembly process to use the packaging plugin and the assembly plugin: even with sharing the configurations between distributions it will mean a very substantial increase in maintenance to ship 2 versions, and I am not at all sure it is worth the trouble if we can provide a single-container choice using the installer.

thanks
david jencks


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