----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2001 8:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Ant2] scoping of properties
> Thats an interesting question. Should the container or the task implement
> policy? Container implementing it is useful because that means it has
> complete control over it and tasks always behave consistently. The
> disadvantage being that you may sometimes want inconsistencies.
Definitely an interesting topic. These are the same concepts that generated
the J2EE container specifications. The container provides several implicit
services which implement policy that previously required hand-coding and
careful attention to detail (@see: distributed transaction processing, role
based security, JNDI, JMS, and so on, and now being overlayed by things like
SOAP).
Certainly EJB, JMS, JNDI, etc are not needed in many applications, but when
they are it sure is nice to have them simply handed to you on a silver
platter with no questions asked.
How does a J2EE container address inconsistencies in people desiring to go
"outside the box" and do things their own way? It doesn't stop them, it
just makes it more difficult by things going against the grain not being
considered "best practices". JSP allows folks to write scriptlets all over
the place and blur together what should be layered as model, view, and
controller. Nothing should stop folks from doing silly stuff, but when
silly stuff is done with powerful tools it becomes readily apparent that
something silly is being done. Sun spends a lot of effort to communicate
best practices in its Java technologies. Why don't they just "force" users
to do things that way instead? (I argue that flexibility is left there for
future possibly unforeseen extensibility - why close doors and shut off
options when its not necessary, just advise against out-dated methodologies)
I'm not sure if I provided any useful view to this thread, but hopefully
there is some synergy between Ant's target/task "container" and other
"container" concepts in the Java world.
Erik
