Stefano Bagnara wrote:
David Jencks ha scritto:
I've been hoping for a Geronimo-JAMES integration since the start of
the Geronimo project. Two fairly recent developments in JAMES have
now made this a relatively simple task: the maven build and the
spring integration code.
[...]
Instructions:
1. Apply patches for JAMES-840, 841, and 842 to james trunk. Get all
the jars needed for the build into the private stage repository
(JAMES-840). (I realize these instructions are unclear but they are
the best I have at the moment)
I really hope we can tweak them and apply all of them. I commented
each issue on JIRA.
2. Build JAMES with maven
mvn clean install -Plocal
If the maven build is not acceptable to our PMC another approach could
be to add a maven repository install script to the ant build.
Of course I would prefer if our PMC accept that people may prefer
maven to build our products.
3. Build geronimo trunk (I haven't checked to see if sufficiently up
to date geronimo snapshots are available. We also have some private
repo issues that may make at least one local build of geronimo
necessary).
Interesting.
4. check out
svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/geronimo/plugins/james/trunk
I see there are 3 modules for that project:
geronimo-james/
james/
james-server/
can you explain (I don't know anything about "car" module type) ?
Is there anything you think should be moved to james project instead
of geronimo?
5. build james plugin
mvn clean install -Pwith-assembly
6. Fire up the sample server
cd james-server/target
tar xzf james-server-1.0-SNAPSHOT-bin.tar.gz
./james-server-1.0-SNAPSHOT/bin/gsh geronimo/start-server
I've put the james config files in a geronimo-standard location of
var/james/config. I changed the ports so the server would start
without superuser permissions. So far I just know the server starts
without errors: I haven't figure out how to test if it can actually
do anything.
Cool!
It looks like really simple!
-----------------------------------
Future directions
Even in its current state this plugin/integration is only viable if
the JAMES community
- works to resolve the issues noted in JAMES-840, 841, 842
- continues to maintain the maven build
+1
Currently there is minimal integration between geronimo and JAMES.
One really obvious integration point would be to use geroniimo
supplied datasources. However glancing at the code there appears to
be a certain amount of fishing for configuration rather than
dependency injection. I'm wondering whether there is any interest in
moving to JPA based database access, and whether this would be
significantly harder than just changing the datasource source.
Obviously this would imply moving JAMES to java 5.
+1
Moving to java 5 IMHO is no more an issue: as soon as a feature will
require java 5 we should simply stop declaring 1.4 compatibility: I
don't know anyone using an 1.4 jvm at this point.
Another issue I came across is use of com.sun mail classes (I started
by trying to use the geronimo mail provider before I understood why
the stage repo wasn't working for me). Is this intentional? Are you
interested in also supporting the geronimo mail implementation?
It is intentional. Last time I checked it geronimo mail implementation
was not enough for our delivery needs. There is a lot to change and we
would probably stop using javamail at all, instead of supporting
geronimo implementation for the remote delivery task. This is only my
opinion, of course.
When was the last time you checked? The Geronimo javamail
implementation has underdone quite a bit of upgrade over the last couple
of years. We now have support for POP3, IMAP, NNTP (Store and
Transport). We also take requests, if there are particular features
missing. It's difficult for us to add those when we don't even know
people think there's something missing.
Rick
Finally I came across some comments that DNS is needed (as you can
probably tell I know almost nothing about mail). I wondered if any
thought had been given to using apacheds in-vm for this.
We don't need a DNS server, just DNS lookup capabilities. We don't use
the JVM built-in DNS lookup mechanism because of issues in the caching
and expiration support. apacheds does not provide a dns client library.
At the moment the geronimo-james integration is simply a single gbean
for the whole james application: do you think it would be hard to
support 1 gbean per function? JAMES is composed by api modules,
library modules and function modules. functions only depends on
libraries and api, libraries only on apis, and api have no internal
dependencies.
deployments simply aggregate functions. Is it possible to create
separate GBean for functions only when functions depends on shared
services or the only solution is to publish 1 gbean for each of our
services? I don't know geronimo, but it would be a great deployment
alternative if it allow us to undeploy 1 single function (e.g: the
spoolmanager), alter its configuration and redeploy it without
stopping the smtp/pop3 servers.
Stefano
