John
Thanks for that, will look into further and let you know.
Stuart
-----Original Message-----
From: John Ellis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 17 November 2000 17:44
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: System properties
According to the dtd:
http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/web-app_2.2.dtd
There is an "env-entry" tag that has name-value pairs like you mentioned.
The
version of tomcat that I am using (3.1) did not seem to being doing anything
with this entry. It does seem like it would be the perfect place for
exactly
what you are talking about.
Does anyone know what this entry is (the dtd description did not
specifically
say how to get these values back -- I am assuming System.getProperties())?
Does
anyone know if more current version of tomcat support it? Will future
versions?
John
Stuart Farnan wrote:
> OK marvellous,
>
> I get all that, TOMCAT_OPTS is not my first choice if it is just basically
> the command line. On the subject of using a startup servlet to do the
work
> of reading the info and passing it on to the utility classes that need it,
> this is an option, but would mean writing a servlet for to do this, and
> also, anywhere else I use the utility classes, they would need to be
> 'initialised' in the same way by some other class in the other
application.
> This would of course have to happen before the class is used, and I had
> thought that is should be possible to encapsulate all the details of the
> connection pooling in one place, including the actions of reading the
system
> properties file. Yeah, all the stuff is in process, no separate database
> access server.
>
> >From the looks of things, it is just the way it is, although I was hoping
> the there would be some way to put stuff in the web.xml file, maybe in the
> servlet tag like:
>
> <system-property>
> <name>myproperty</name>
> <value>42</value>
> </system-property>
>
> Anyone think this is a good idea, or am I talking rubbish?
>
> Stu
>
> PS. static, bad? It is useful! Singletons (you mentioned), cleanly
handling
> exceptions in constructors, general things you want to share between
> instances, object caches, etc.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rachel Greenham [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: 17 November 2000 16:18
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: System properties
>
> On Friday 17 November 2000 15:46, you wrote:
> > Rachel,
> >
> > Thanks for that, about the static initializers... The classes that use
> them
> > are not servlets, merely utility classes are used in the web application
> > and also elsewhere.
> >
> > For instance, a class, or series of classes that deal with database
> > connection pooling, could conceiveably have a configuration file to let
> > them know what pools to set up, min and max connections, where the
server
> > is, what the driver class is, etc. And these classes are useful in
other
> > apps, not only in web applications. Now of course you can hard code
into
> > the class, the file to load, but this is ugly, it is nicer to say "java
> > -Ddb.properties=/home/stuart/db.properties". As the classes are not
> > servlets, servletContext.getResource() is not really an option.
>
> Yes it is. Your startup servlet reads these parameters, parses that data,
> and
> then invokes your utility classes with that initialisation data.
>
> consider "static" harmful. :-) I only ever use it to define constants,
like
> database field names or whatnot, or to hold the instance of a
> single-instance
> class.
>
> Basically, if your database accesses are going on in the same *process* as
> your servlets, ie: you have some generic headless data-access javabeans
that
>
> do the work and you want to call them from your servlets, you should still
> have a servlet that's initialised on startup of the web application, and
> *that* initialises your data-access beans. That way you can also catch the
> web application being shut down and cleanly close down your data-access
> classes too.
>
> If your data-access is happening in another process from your servlets,
and
> communicating over network sockets, eg: using RMI or XML/SOAP type thing,
> then you initialise that task in any way you see fit - the servlet engine
> just talks to it when it wants to. If you're doing this, you may well want
> to
> look seriously at EJB.
>
> > I could not find anything about TOMCAT_OPTS on the web site, persumably
> > this is an environment variable, what format do you put system
properties
> > in, is it like
> >
>
TOMCAT_OPTS="db.properties=/home/stuart/db.properties:myproperty=anotherpro
> >p ertyvalue:.."?
>
> Not quite. TOMCAT_OPTS is just given to the java command line used to
invoke
>
> Tomcat, so it's in that format, ie: "-Ddb.properties=value" etc.
>
> --
> Rachel
