The observation about JSPs is exactly what I was alluding to. Does the entire UI have to be converted to Velocity for this approach to work? There's an intermediate path that would involve converting only the connector portions, which might be viable.
Karl -----Original Message----- From: ext Erik Hatcher [mailto:erik.hatc...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2010 7:27 AM To: connectors-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Some more thoughts on a classloader plug-in style architecture Actually the problem is quite tractable. We switch the UI over to Velocity templates (like Solr's VelocityResponseWriter, for example) and embed the UI bits into plugin JAR files that can live externally. JSPs aren't really workable in this fashion. Velocity templates can be loaded from the file system, the classpath, from a String, or from thin air. For example, VelocityResponseWriter allows templates to load from the actual request (clients can send in a template as an HTTP parameter), if not found it looks on the filesystem, and if not found it looks in the classpath. Erik On Jun 2, 2010, at 6:55 AM, Jack Krupansky wrote: > Good point. LCF is a bit more complex than Solr in that sense. > > Maybe a separate class is needed that has methods to retrieve the > crawl and UI components of a connector. > > Or a small XML file with whatever info about the connector is > needed. Or maybe it is simple enough for a properties file. > > Or maybe just a naming convention so that the name of the UI > component can be deduced given the logical name of a connector. > > -- Jack Krupansky > > -------------------------------------------------- > From: <karl.wri...@nokia.com> > Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2010 6:45 AM > To: <connectors-dev@incubator.apache.org> > Subject: Some more thoughts on a classloader plug-in style > architecture > >> It occurred to me that a classloader plug-in reader for LCF would >> not achieve the goal of allowing a fully prebuilt LCF with >> connector add-ons. The reason, which should have been obvious from >> the beginning, is because each connector consists not only of the >> Java implementation, but also a UI component. The UI component >> will need a mechanism similar to the classloader one in order for >> everything to work. >> >> It is possible, I suppose, for precompiled JSP's to be class-loaded >> instead of uncompiled JSP's in the lcf-crawler-ui.war file. >> However this is going to require some care and finesse (and example >> build.xml files) to get it to work properly. >> >> Karl >> >>
