Does HiveMind
provide any other mechanisms for configuration contributions outside of xml? I
have a home-grown services registry that I am considering replacing with
HiveMind because of its extensibility. One of the important concepts in this
(relatively simple) registry is the concept of a configuration provider. And
service can have one or more configuration providers, configured in the registry
file. Many configuration providers have their own xml files, but others provide
data from other sources.
For example, one
important service is an authorization service, which maintains a cached set of
permissions rules and uses them to see if users with a given role can perform a
given action. In simple cases, this can be configured with an xml file that maps
role principals to allowed operations (optionally supplying an OGNL constraint
as well). In other cases, the source of the configuration is actually stored in
a database, because users can modify the permissions themselves. In the simple
case, I use an xml configuration provider, configured in the registry with the
expected filename. In the more complex case, I implement a custom db
configuration provider, that knows the names of the necessary tables and can
translate them into the interfaces expected by the authorization service. This
has db connection information (like a datasource) configured in the
registry.
From what I can
tell, most HiveMind config is based around XML rules, built into modules, that
convert XML into the expected objects. Is there support for a more generic
configuration contribution, that simple provides a list of configuration
elements, but that manages the retrieval of those elements
separately?
Thanks,
Drew
