Been wondering about something... Often in a tomcat application I use separate XML files for configuration. I normally end up using a lite weight sax parser that I wrote especially for this, but every time I do this... I think to myself... I'm just doing what has already been done in tomcat.
I dont imagine that these internal libs are exposed in a normal tomcat application, unless i'm missing something, but I was wondering if its not possible to get at the libraries almost as its done in embedded tomcat, so one can reduce the overhead of duplicate functionality. For example if one went for a similar parameter structure in a separate xml file... its in not possible to get at that using a tomcat lib? If so I'd imagine there is a whole range of tricks one could use... In theory a user should never have to go find a base64 lib, or an MD5 lib etc etc... nor anything else that Tomcat has to use???? I think there is a lot of very standard stuff that tomcat could expose through an API... if it has an Xerces lib, why make a user get another one? For example is it possible to do somelike an XSLT transform without any external libs... It feels like I'm sitting on a gold mine... but I'm still prospecting... if u know wot I mean... Seems like everyone is missing it.... remember reading some article where the guy was saying that one can get at the undocumented sun.misc.BASE64 Decoder which he spent hours discovering...and this was for a tomcat application... seems kinda stupid when Tomcat must have that class already?? So as the actual developers of Tomcat... if you make a web-app... do you download duplicate infrastructure... or do you just dig into a class when you know its there already? ________________________________________________________________ Johnny Kewl eMail: John<No Spam>kewlstuff.co.za -- replace <No Spam> with @ -- Cell: +027-72- 473-9331 Java Developer (Tomcat Aficionado) Free Tomcat software at http://coolese.100free.com/ ________________________________________________________________
