I'm not sure but I think the Class-Path entry in war files is covered
by the spec because EAR, WAR and RAR are JAR files. J2EE 1.4
excluded EAR files from that. EAR manifest files should not contain a
Class-Path entry.
packaging description from sun:
http://java.sun.com/j2ee/verified/packaging.html
Also the class path entry is relative to the war file not the WEB-INF/classes
or WEB-INF/lib in the war file.
Thanks,
Mario
Dain Sundstrom wrote:
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
