It is late but let my creative comments fly, no offense Chris is a very
helpful guy, I am his fan(even if the rest would contradict).
Please consider that to me and perhaps others embedding ApacheDS, having
an xml to edit is a great thing!
Loading things into a DIT is less pleasant:
- if it is not LDIF, and I have to start bootstrap the thing to create
my own config. Like the situation of the schema system right now where I
have to modify the build and work in your source tree to create my
custom bootstrap package.
- if LDIF... it is still a weird syntax to use for IOC assembly. I would
like to modify, add my custom interceptors, and components. One of the
thing that is less fortunate about the Store procedures and triggers
that I needed serialized class files, which is hassle for embedding. For
a build I would have to setup, config, dump config, teardown.
- I would not like to put/encode xml into an LDIF file.....
I realize that admin tools, vs embedding is in a constant battle.
embedding needs configuration without actually running the DS.
admin tool want to configure a bare instance, any possible aspects after
the DS is started.
Both are legit cases, with very different objectives.
I like DS because it is a Lego toolkit glued together by the IOC, Please
do not take that way from me.
DS is great because it is embeddable easy to customize keep that aspect
alive!
Aron
Chris Custine wrote:
This is basically a response to some of the other threads regarding
server.xml and Config in DIT, but I don't want to derail those threads
if this turns out to be a stupid idea.
I have been thinking about this for a while, and I have to admit that
I am one of the guys that likes Spring and the xml config files.
Because of that I have been thinking about possible interim steps so
that we can get a good grip on the needs and wants of the users while
still solving some of our internal problems that we want to address in
the short term. Based on the recent threads about this topic, I get
the distinct feeling that we might be underestimating the affect this
subject has as far as user impact and user preferences and stand a
good chance of irritating some people.
My latest idea seems really obvious the more I think about it... For
the time being, why don't we just move towards storing the server.xml
in its entirety as a string attribute under ou=system somewhere and
restructure the startup sequence to properly read and load the Spring
context from there? This sounds crazy, but bear with me for a
moment... This would give us the ability to "configure in DIT" so to
speak, but would also expose some really interesting options for
remote configuration, like modifying the current Apache DS
Configuration plugin that Pierre-Arnaud has already written to just
read from and save to the server it is currently connected to. We
could also do an interceptor or something similar on the server to
write the file out to disk after a remote edit and allow a startup
option or quick command line script to load a new file after you edit
it in vi or similar. This CLI could even put the data directly to the
JDBM tables so that you can make edits without the server running.
I have a couple of reasons for bringing this to the table. First of
all, I am one of those dirty, sadistic perverts that likes editing xml
files by hand as opposed to many other forms of config... xml is like
a second language to me :-)
Second and most importantly for ApacheDS, is that an approach like
this will give us a great short term benefit of remote config and
admin capability, without all of the work. The server config editor
that PAM wrote looks fantastic to me and (hopefully) we can just
extend the concept and hack it to do what is needed for this without
re-writing all of it. This way we can do the Config in DIT in an
incremental fashion and possibly save some grief that we may encounter
later. We will also be able to move on more quickly to more serious
tasks and implement high visibility features.
I am sure there are some technicalities that may be obstacles to this
idealistic approach, but I have had worse ideas, so I thought I would
bring it up and present it. What do you guys think?
Thanks,
Chris
