Hey guys Sorry I have had not a lot of time to commit to this project lately.
I wanted to outline some of the thoughts I have had about the project. To start a direction sort of conversation. First to outline some of the problems with the application: Install is complicated. (sql scripts are nasty, in my opinion), but it currently works. The ant build script could be improved upon, and the app itself could be improved. Database support is limited. We support Oracle (and most of mysql is the mysql branch) The support of apache/tomcat for configs is limited. more specifically if you use mod_jk, there's a few things that are hard-coded that really shouldn't be. Same goes for tomcat server.xml files. (Velocity templating of config files?) There's been small but infrequent conversations about adding in modular support for other application servers. There is no automated test system. Basically, I think a lot of the focus should be on giving this podling a fighting chance to survive the incubator. I had talked at the last Apachecon about porting the code to use a jsr 170 back-end, ie jackrabbit. This would allow 2 major features - more database support, and a transactional rollback system for configuration changed. Both which are not currently included. This is no small undertaking however. And I'd like to start a discussion around that. This would also work to solve a little bit of the first issue I mentioned - some of the complexity in setting up the app is in fact the database setup itself. When the app was originally designed - the concept was to have two types of modules. One for the application servers, one for 'connector - type' modules. That is something that is roughly followed currently. And could be improved upon. Steve
