Hey all,
I have been trying to get my thought straight on profiles/templates.
And, I think I just might have done it (we'll see). Warning, there
is
very little 'implementation' here - mostly food for thought.
First of all, I think that it would be useful to have several ways of
thinking about groups of modules. Right now, we have maven artifacts
and plugins (that are groups of artifacts). In this discussion, we
are
trying to figure out how to divide/build up a server. And, the
idea of
profiles came up to group plugins that are necessary for a particular
function.
So far, I like everything about the direction that the discussion is
going. But, I have two ideas that I think might improve the
managability of server building/configuration.
The first involves adding a list of profiles that the different
Gernonimo modules/artifacts would 'satisfy' into the pom's. That
would
enable us to stay away from manually building/rebuilding the list of
default included ('provided by Geronimo') profiles.
The second would be to add one more level of grouping artifacts -
templates. The idea would be that profiles group modules that
provide a
particular function and templates would group profiles that (when
combined) provide a particular server.
For example, right now, we provide five distinct 'flavors' of
Geronimo:
minimal (framework), little-G (tomcat), little-G (jetty), JEE5
(tomcat),
and JEE5 (jetty). Those would correspond to five 'provided'
templates
for Geronimo.
As an (extremely oversimplified) example, here is what the little-G
template might look like:
<template id='little-g-tomcat'>
<description>Geronimo Tomcat Little-G Server</description>
<version>2.1.2</version>
<includesProfile>
<!-- full function profiles -->
<profile id='geronimo framework' version='x.x' />
<profile id='tomcat web container' version='x.x' />
</includesProfile>
<includesPlugin>
<!-- individual plugins, either provided or 'customer specific' -->
</includesPlugin>
<includesArtifact>
<!-- individual libraries -->
</includesArtifact>
</template
A template like this would be relatively easy for either a program or
user to build and allows for almost unlimited customizability in
describing what should go into building a server. Then, rather than
having our server assembly portlet actually do the work of making an
actual server - it could simply output the template. Or, we could
have
a new option that would allow for template creation and export (ie:
export current server as template).
Then we could either check the currently assembled server against the
template (and pull down whatever profiles/plugins are needed) or
have a
'load template' function that would apply the template to a new
(presumably framework only) server.
Thoughts?
Jay
Lin Sun wrote:
Here is what I am thinking. Let me take the Web profile as an
example:
So we want to allow users to check/select the Web profile to select
all the necessary geronimo plugins for little G. Users would only
see Web profile, instead the 10+ geronimo plugins.
-------------------------------------------------
Select from the following Profiles/Plugin Groups:
__ Web (when this selected, we'll install the 10+ geronimo plugins
for
the user to get little G env.)
__ Web Service
...
-------------------------------------------------
In order to do this, we'll need to know which geronimo plugins can
get
the users to the Web profile and store this relatonship somewhere
that
is avail for both admin console and command line custom
assembly. I
come to the conclusion that we need some sort of group of plugins
function and David reminded me about the geronimo-plugin.xml that
has
no module-id can work as group of plugins. Here is the wording
from
the schema:
If no module-id is provided, that means this is a plugin group,
which
is just a list of other plugins to install.
With that, I can just build a geronimo plugin group for web profile
and have the 10+ geronimo plugins listed as dependencies. This
geronimo plugin group can be available as part of the assmebly,
along
with the other geronimo plugin groups.
The idea is that if a user selects Web profile in either admin
console
or command line, we can just select the corresponding geronimo
plugin
group behind the scene, which would install all its dependencies.
Now back to the web services sample, we 'll have 2 web service
plugin groups:
web service CXF - cxf and cxf-deployer
web service Axis2 - axis2 and axis2-deployer
The web service Jetty plugin group will be included in the jetty
javaee5 assembly and web service tomcat plugin group will be
included
in the tomcat javaee5 assembly. Initially, I plan to only support
custom server assembly from the current local server, so when user
has
jetty assembly, he will see web service CXF. When user has tomcat
assembly, he'll see web service Axis2. In the long run, we could
present both to the users and they can just pick either one.
I hope above addressed your questions. Please feel free to let me
know any other comments you may have.
Lin
On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 11:57 PM, Jarek Gawor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Hmm.. I'm not sure how this profile idea fits in with what the user
have to select in the "assemble a server" portlet. Would there be a
profile for axis2 that only has two plugins axis2 and axis2-
deployer
defined? And there would be a similar profile with two plugins for
cxf? And the user would either pick the axis2 or cxf profile and
combine it with the jetty or tomcat profile? I'm just not sure how
this relates to the steps the user would have to go through in the
portlet to create the desired server.
Jarek
On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Lin Sun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
I have been thinking a bit more on how we achieve this. Here
is my
idea and I welcome your input -
So we have a need to allow users to install groups of
plugins(function
profile), instead of individual plugins. Install individual
plugins
are nice for standalone apps, but for system modules, I think it
would
be better to allow users to install groups of plugins as
functional
profiles(unless the user is an expert user). What we need is to
expose the groups of plugins for certain functions available to
our
users and allow them to select the ones of their interest to
build the
customer server.
I am proposing in addition to store plugin metadata of each
plugin in
the plugin catalog, we could also host installable groups of
plugins
information there (or in a separate catalog file). For
example, for
a function such as Web (same as little G) that has been
discussed in
above posts, we could have the following plugin metadata -
<geronimo-plugin xmlns="http://geronimo.apache.org/xml/ns/plugins-1.3
"
xmlns:ns2="http://geronimo.apache.org/xml/ns/attributes-1.2";>
<name>Geronimo Assemblies :: Minimal + Tomcat</name>
<category>WEB Profile</category>
<profile>true</profile>
<description>A minimal Geronimo server (Little-G) assembly using
the Tomcat web-container.</description>
<url>http://www.apache.org/</url>
<author>Apache Software Foundation</author>
<license osi-approved="true">The Apache Software License,
Version
2.0</license>
<plugin-artifact>
<module-id>
<groupId>org.apache.geronimo.assemblies</groupId>
<artifactId>geronimo-tomcat6-minimal</artifactId>
<version>2.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
<type>car</type>
</module-id>
<geronimo-version>2.2-SNAPSHOT</geronimo-version>
<jvm-version>1.5</jvm-version>
<jvm-version>1.6</jvm-version>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.geronimo.assemblies</groupId>
<artifactId>geronimo-boilderplate-minimal</artifactId>
<version>2.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
<type>jar</type>
</dependency>
<dependency start="false">
<groupId>org.apache.geronimo.framework</groupId>
<artifactId>upgrade-cli</artifactId>
<version>2.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
<type>car</type>
</dependency>
<dependency start="true">
<groupId>org.apache.geronimo.framework</groupId>
<artifactId>rmi-naming</artifactId>
<version>2.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
<type>car</type>
</dependency>
<dependency start="true">
<groupId>org.apache.geronimo.framework</groupId>
<artifactId>j2ee-security</artifactId>
<version>2.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
<type>car</type>
</dependency>
<dependency start="true">
<groupId>org.apache.geronimo.configs</groupId>
<artifactId>tomcat6</artifactId>
<version>2.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
<type>car</type>
</dependency>
...
When a plugin is a profile, it means it just contains a group of
geronimo plugin dependencies that are installable and can perform
certain functions. By installing it, it will simply install the
dependency plugins.
Questions -
How do we build this profile type of plugin? We could build them
manually initially to try things but maybe c-m-p could be used
here.
How do we install this profile type of plugin? I think we could
leverage the pluginInstallerGBean to install it...when profile is
true, we just download the dependencies.
How/Where should we make this file avail? We could make this
file
avail in geronimo-plugins.xml (or another catalog file in repo)
and
with our server assembly (one assembly contains the plugin
profiles it
have). When building customer server, when load all the plugins
that
are profile and ask users to pick which ones they want. If we
have a
framework that can install geronimo plugins, a user can just
download
the framework and pick from our apache repo on which plugin
profiles
they want to build their geronimo server.
How are we handle the upgrade scenarios Joe mentioned? No idea
yet... I think this is a rather complicated scenario.
Thanks,
Lin
