On 16 Oct 00, at 12:00, Kevin Lewis wrote:
> > 1. Putting things that depend on both jBoss and Tomcat in a new
> > "tomcat integration" project, or if the code is too compact to merit
> > this treatment, putting it in the "contrib" directory
>
> Interesting. I would assume that at some point, jBoss will be a J2EE
> system with Tomcat as the web container. I don't like the idea of
> contrib, since I think the Tomcat integration (and perhaps distribution)
> should eventually be part of the core jBoss distribution.
>
Hi Kevin,
Point well taken. I agree that a goal of jBoss is to provide a
complete J2EE platform. It's also probably true that Tomcat will
have a special place as the "natural" web container for jBoss.
However, Rickard's design enables an environment where each
major piece of that platform can be replaced by an alternative. We
might want to ask if Tomcat's role as the web container is central
enough that we can require its availability during the build.
A second issue is that Tomcat and jBoss are different projects
managed by different boards and written by different authors. It
would be difficult to coordinate versioning, distribution, and such, if
the core jBoss build depended on Tomcat files. (What if
BaseInterceptor changes? Which version should we distribute with
jBoss?)
I don't think we should go too far in avoiding coupling at the
integration level--e.g. for a Tomcat interceptor. It would be awkward
to write one that didn't import both Tomcat and jBoss classes.
However, my opinion is that we don't want to create coupling at the
project level--i.e. coupling jBoss to Tomcat.
That's what motivated me to suggest a different project. My
suggestion of "contrib" didn't adequately convey the central
importance of the integration code, and I should probably have
stuck with "tomcat integration."
However, I recognize that a separate project has some problems,
which I think motivated your concern. Maybe a better approach is
just to have a more configurable ant build. It could look for a
"TOMCAT" environment variable, similar to the startup files. If
Tomcat exists, it could build the interceptors; if not, it could skip
them.
What do you think?
-Dan
