We (by which I think I mean myself, Jeremy, and David J) talked a bit at ApacheCon about changing our strategy on deplyoment descriptors. Our conclusion was that we should split the DDs up again, so that Geronimo DDs *do not* extend J2EE DDs, but we have 2 separate DD structures. As for the POJOs, we would have one set of POJOs containing both J2EE and Geronimo deployment information, in a single tree instead of a "Geronimo extends J2EE" tree (because we really have no use for a J2EE tree on its own).
Actually there's less emphasis on the geronimo dd for the web tier as compared to the ejb tier.
It would make both the schemas and the POJOs quite a bit cleaner, though we would have to do a bit of mapping at load time.I can see the appeal of a single merged POJO, but on the other hand, I'd rather we used an automated tool than having to maintain a lot of custom code.
This has two implications:
1) We'll have to rewrite the schemas and POJOs
2) We can't use a XML binding tool that generates its own POJOs (since we will have 2 schemas going into one POJO tree). On the up side, I've recently heard of tools where you have to configure the tool to bind XML to existing beans, so this might not be a big problem.
Just one other consideration: to satisfy JSR77, containers need to be able to return, as a String, the xml of the j2ee deployment descriptor of their application components. Currently, this involves a lot of faffing around with DOMS plus converting to POJOs. So, I'd like to see some way of easily obtaining this stringified form from a (merged?) POJO.
I'm willing to undertake 1, and I'm not heartbroken by 2 (mainly because we've been having such problems with tools already). But I guess I should put in a 3:
3) The deployment process will go unstable while we work this out
At ApacheCon, we decided to hold off until "after the demo". The demo is over, but now people are talking about a release. What do you think about undertaking this now?
Aaron
cheers Jan
