On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 8:04 AM, Noa Resare <n...@spotify.com> wrote: > So, when working with the 4.1 packaging issues I have more than once been > intensely frustrated with the current tomcat situation. > > To recap: Some cloustack components are set up as web applications and > requires a servlet container as their execution environment. The current > solution to provide such as servlet container is to have the cloudstack > package depend on an Apache Tomcat 6 package provided by the OS > distribution. Cloudstack then ships copies of the configuration files > needed by tomcat to run along with init scripts that bootstraps tomcat in a > way that references the cloudstack shipped artifacts. This setup has many > problems. > > # Cloudstack assumes that it's configuration files will be enough in sync > with what the externally provided tomcat expects. > > # Lots and lots of fairly esoteric config files included in cloudstack > makes the learning curve steep > > # Tomcat setup, as it stands without trying any specific hackery to make it > do other stuff, is a labyrinth of shell scripts > > # Things gets even more complicated when cloudstack invokes tomcat provided > scripts. > > # tomcat has it's own log files for the early parts of it's startup. > > It shouldn't need to be this hard. webapps are standardized for a reason, > and the requirements we have on a servlet execution environments are not > that special (one webapp on /client listening one port, and possibly > another webapp for the aws stuff listening on another port) > > As a proof of concept I hacked together the starting points of > a replacement for this whole mess yesterday, a few tens of lines of code > setting up an embedded jetty web container. A few lines of code to parse a > config file, set up logging and spawn an embedded servlet container. > > Points of discussion: > > # What features do we need for our servlet container? Do I miss > anything obvious? > > # Do we have some kind of loyalty towards tomcat, it being one of the main > apache projects after all? 2 minutes of googling seems to indicate that > there are embedded tomcat options as well, but I know jetty better so that > seemed like a better stating point for my proof of concept. > > My proof of concept code is available here: > https://github.com/noaresare/incubator-cloudstack/tree/noa/runner > > /noa > >
I don't think that we have any loyalties to Tomcat. You aren't the first person to voice frustration at how things are deployed. I'd be happy if we ended up with a truly deployable war. Thanks for starting this work. --David
