Apropos of Aaron's plea (see blow), I know I voted +1 for POJOs, but considering it a little more and given the difficulties experienced, are we sure that this is a necessary approach?

That is, do we have a clear set of use-cases and requirements that are met by POJOs or in fact a non-DOM model? I'm not against some POJO etc representation of the deployment descriptors, I just think we need to clearly understand the reasons why we need them.

I haven't actually seen any compelling use-cases yet - the ones I can enumerate would be better served by dealing directly with a DOM :

  + JSR88 deployment:
    the purpose of JSR88 beans is to deal with xml deployment
    descriptors. They need to perform xpath matching.

  + Web deployment:
    the concrete web containers (eg Jetty, Tomcat) deal with xml
    descriptors anyway, so they already DOM-ify them. This in fact
    leads to double parsing of web.xml descriptors: once by geronimo
    and once by the container. This could be optimised by modifying
    Jetty and Tomcat to operate on a DOM version of web.xml instead.
    However, if geronimo moves to POJO representations of the
    descriptors, then such a modification wouldn't be possible (or
    we'd have to introduce a POJO->DOM conversion).


So can we enumerate the advantages of a non-DOM representation of the deployment descriptors?

Other requirements for whatever representation of the deployment descriptors we choose should include:

   + must be fast translating object <-> xml
   + must require minimum supporting jars (we *must* avoid /lib bloat)
   + must support xpath
   + nice if object <-> DOM was easily available


regards Jan

Aaron Mulder wrote:
<snip>
        Also, the profusion of commons libraries required to get this
running is a little frustrating.

Can we just use DOM please?



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