I've been thinking about some changes to the geronimo-plugin schema
to make plugin catalogs less verbose and easier to maintain across
versions of Geronimo. The problem with the current schema is that
some of the plugin metadata that is sensitive to the geronimo version
is grouped in <geronimo-versions> elements, but some is not.
Plugins are often sensitive to the geronimo version they were
developed under since they typically rely on lots of container
services. Besides that, in general plugins only work in the version
of geronimo they were exported from (or car plugin version). So this
schema limitation makes it difficult to create one catalog that
supports several versions of geronimo without having a lot of
redundant plugin entries. Right now we maintain separate catalogs at
http://geronimo.apache.org/plugins for each version of geronimo
because of this limitation.
I attached a proposed schema here :
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GERONIMO-3330
Using that new schema a plugin entry would look something like:
<plugin>
<name/>
<category/>
<description/>
<url/>
<author/>
<license/>
<plugin-module>
<module-id/>
<hash/>
<geronimo-version/>
<jvm-version-version/>
<prerequisite>
<id/>
<resource-type/>
<description/>
</prerequisite>
<dependency/>
<obsoletes/>
<source-repository/>
</plugin-module>
<plugin-module>
...
</plugin-module>
</plugin>
Note that the metadata that is sensitive to the geronimo version is
encapsulated in a <plugin-module> element. And a single <plugin> can
several <plugin-module> elements (e.g. one for each version of
geronimo it supports).
While making this schema change two other things I was considering is
factoring the plugin code out of geronimo-system into a separate
config and using JAXB to handle the XML processing instead of the sax
code it currently uses. Feedback is welcome.
Best wishes,
Paul
