Paul McMahan wrote:
On Apr 4, 2007, at 6:10 PM, David Jencks wrote:
What I'm hoping for in the future for these kinds of situations is
that there can be plugins configured for each of several databases,
e.g. mysql, db2, firebird, etc and to switch the backend all you need
to do is change a line in artifact_aliases.properties. I'm trying
this out with Peter Petersson with the roller plugin we've started in
the plugins dir.
That sounds like the right direction. This might get easier if we
separate the datasource component from the actual database itself. I'm
not sure about the roller plugin, but the Liferay datasource component
includes not only the datasource but a derby database that is
prepopulated with the Liferay schema. So, a side effect of installing
the Liferay datasource plugin is that you get a new derby database under
var/derby that's ready to roll. From an end user's perspective this
makes it really easy to get a running portal server in Geronimo as a
POC. But users looking for more configurability and optimization are
not as well served. That becomes apparent as you read Hernan's new article.
Just for additional reference, Liferay folks provide only one plugin for the
datasource, after that they provide a ton of sql scripts to create and populate
data for about 8 different databases.
Agreed, it would be great to have just one click to install and just one click
to remove specific features/services with all it's dependencies.
Anyway, I think its generally better to have the "other project"
supply plugins for the databases they support rather than asking users
to create one themselves. Making the process easy... that will be the
challenge.
I totally agree here as well. I think the main impediment right now is
that setting up and maintaining a plugin repository (or even just a
collection of plugins to be hosted elsewhere) requires some research and
trial and error. We can help that situation by providing more examples
and documentation, and by improving the overall design. I hope that
Geronimo's own plugin repository will provide an example worth emulating.
Best wishes,
Paul
Cheers!
Hernan
