On Jul 11, 2006, at 8:30 AM, David Jencks wrote:
On Jul 11, 2006, at 8:03 AM, Aaron Mulder wrote:
What if the WAR is in a subdir within the EAR like foo/bar/some.war?
Then ".." alone won't work to resolve paths relative to the EAR.
Yes, whatever relative path we might generate certainly would have
to take account of the position of the war inside the ear.
IIRC, the manifest class path is relative to the archive itself. In
this case it is relative to the some.war, so if you want something in
the foo dir, the manifest class path entry would have to be ../../
jar.jar
Also, I think all of this is out side of the spec. IIRC the spec
only talks about manifest class path entries of jar files, and since
a war is not a jar file it isn't covered by the spec. Regardless, I
think it is a good idea to support this, but I want to clarify that I
don't believe this is a certification issue.
I would think from a WAR-in-EAR, we could identify the Module ID of
the EAR, and then use the repo to construct a path to the JAR-in-EAR
with the EAR module ID and the JAR path. Is there a reason why that
wouldn't work?
IIUC you are suggesting that the war configuration/module keep
track of two parts of its classpath: one inside itself, for WEB-INF/
lib and WEB-INF/classes, and one inside the enclosing ear, for the
manifest classpath. This certainly seems possible to me but I
wonder what advantage it would have over only tracking stuff in one
place.
So, now I see even more possibilities:
1. copy the manifest cp entries from the ear into the war. This
would keep the war self contained, but otherwise seems like a lot
of extra work for nothing.
2. keep track of the stuff inside the war and inside the ear
separately (your proposal IIUC)
3. keep track of the war classpath based on the war location inside
the ear, so manifest classpath entries get a ../ prepended to them
(if the war was in a subdirectory in the ear, manifest cp entries
would most likely already have one or more ../ since entries are
relative to the war location).
4. keep track of the entire war classpath based on the ear
location, so the stuff in WEB-INF/[lib,classes] would have the war
location inside the ear prepended.
I'm tempted by (4). To me it says, here's the ear with a lot of
stuff inside, and you can define classloaders that access an
arbitrary subset of the stuff inside. I think this is the most
compatible with the idea that's been floating around for a while of
keeping the configuration separate from the j2ee artifact that is
is based on: i.e. copy (possibly with unpacking) the j2ee artifact
into the repo, and not into the car file: the car file just gets
pointers into the j2ee artifact to define its classloader.
Um I didn't really understand all the options, but I would like to
suggest that the class path contain patterns (the code is already in
place for this) and we resolve these patterns against the root dir of
the war. For manifest class path entries, we would just need to
prepend each entry with ../ to get outside the war dir and prepend
them to the class path with the manifest entries. For example, the
example aaron used above would result in the following:
War base dir: foo/bar/web.war/
War class path: ../../../jar.jar lib/classes lib/*.jar lib/*.zip
Final class path: foo/jar.jar
foo/bar/web.war/lib/classes
foo/bar/web.war/lib/lib.jar
foo/bar/web.war/lib/lib.zip
-dain
