On Tuesday, July 06, 1999 7:15 AM, Ted Neward [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> Craig McClanahan wrote:
> > A "Web Application Archive" file is in fact a standard JAR file, with
the
> > extra configuration stuff in a /WEB-INF subdirectory.
> >
> Then why not simply mandate the .jar file must have a /WEB-INF
subdirectory
> in order to be treated as a Web Application Archive? Why create a new
> extension?
I strongly agree. As I tried to point out in my comments, adding a new
"file type"
to a system is a bad thing. It means that work may have to be done on every
client system (millions) and many server systems to do some or all of the
following:
associate the file extension with a mime type
define a valid set of operations on these files
define a default operation on these files
set up a visual representation for these files
And will also probably need changes to many applications which need to
understand
and process these files (eg. WinZip etc.)
This seems completely mad to me, when by simply adding another optional
section
to the META-INF structure of the existing jar file spec, all of this could
be avoided.
The only counter-argument I can imagine is that some software may want/need
to
do different things to "jar" and "war" files, _based_solely_on_extension_.
I can't think
of a real, unavoidable, example of this usage though. Can anyone?
Frank.
--
Frank Carver
[ Personal: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.efsol.com/ ]
[ At Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel +44 (0)1473 227371 ]
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