I fully agree to support that.
EAR is by definition an application, and I think that every deployable
feature in Geronimo should be able to deploy within an EAR.
Especially for ServiceMix, I think this would be a great addition:
ServiceMix is an integration bus and it should be able to completely
integrate with Geronimo, but some limitations are difficult to work
around, the main ones being:
* the lack of global JNDI,
* deployment along with other J2EE resources (which would be solved by
deploying JBI applications within an EAR)
* use of unmanaged threads wrt to transactions and J2EE resources (you
have to be fully integrated into Geronimo so that you can initialize the
necessary thread local variables containing the contexts for various
Geronimo layers when these contexts could easily be created when first
used in a non-initialized thread)
AFAIK, Geronimo main goal so far has been to be fully J2EE compliant,
but all these points fall into the ease of use category and could /
should be addressed.
Cheers,
Guillaume Nodet
Aaron Mulder wrote:
Any objections to supporting different module types (such as Geronimo
service JARs or future Spring or ServiceMix JARs) within an EAR? For
example, this would let you create an EAR with a normal EJB JAR, a
normal web app WAR, and a Geronimo service JAR containing GBeans used
by the EJBs or web app (or that just run when the app runs).
To do this, I figure we'd just let you specify additional modules in
the geronimo-application.xml, even if you're not going to provide a
plan for them. So it would be something like this:
application.xml
<application>
<module><ejb>foo.jar</ejb></module>
<module><web>...</web></module>
</application>
geronimo-application.xml
<application>
<module>
<other>bar.jar</other>
</module>
</application>
Where a plan like this indicates that there are no overrides for the
EJB or Web app, but we're adding another module, bar.jar, with
unspecified type. That should be OK since during deployment we ask
all the config builders whether they can handle the specified module,
so we'll figure out whether we can handle it, and if so, what type of
module it is (based on what deployment descriptors / plans it
contains).
Thanks,
Aaron
