Hi Jeff,
I'm afraid our points of view are rather different. I've added some
comments inline to try to explain my point of view.
On Jul 13, 2009, at 11:14 PM, chi runhua wrote:
Before we start working on documentation, I'd like to confirm what I
understood so far is correct.
We have 2 different scenarios: (1) users are going to develop new
applications but they are used to the tomcat way; (2) users have
existing application running on Tomcat, we'd like to provide a
seamless way migrating to Geronimo.
For (1), We support server.xml now because we want users to use
Geronimo in the same way they used to be as in Tomcat, such as
connector configuration, security realm, log configuration, valve
and deploy method as well; in this case,
Connector configuration and deployment in geronimo are still
completely different from tomcat. Tomcat security realms won't
integrate with geronimo security.
Geronimo will take care of users' applications and provide run-time
environment. Anyway, we will recommend users to adopt GBean usage
for Web container configuration instead of using server.xml, which
we can demostrate the up-sides of Geronimo architecture using app-
per-port sample;
The only reason I can see to configure a tomcat server using gbeans
rather than server.xml is if you have a legacy server configuration
that you don't want to convert. In my view using a server.xml is a
lot more convenient than the individual gbeans.
As for (2), users can simply copy their server.xml into /var/
catalina by overwriting the one in Geronimo, and for example, user
need to copy the applications to /var/catalina/web-apps/. There
would be nothing different from the old days. Geronimo will provide
run-time enviornment.
I'd really prefer that we emphasize server assembly using geronimo
plugins rather than manual file copying. The two ways I've thought of
so far for setting up a tomcat server is by replacing the tomcat
plugin we ship or by unpacking a server.xml from a plugin to overwrite
the server.xml we ship. The second method seems unreliable to me,
what happens if you deploy 2 such plugins?
I haven't checked but I hope that tomcat hot deployment doesn't work.
IMO web apps should be deployed using a geronimo plan basically as
they are today. If copying an app into a tomcat hot deploy folder
does work, the result won't relate to geronimo services in any way
(for instance jndi, transactions, security).
In either scenario, users' apps will be untouched and cann't be used
as geronimo plugin because they are still tomcat-specific.
Web apps should still be deployed as plugins using a geronimo plan.
Otherwise they will not get any benefit from running in geronimo
rather than plain tomcat: they won't have access to geronimo jndi,
transactions, security, ejbs, or any other services.
At the moment we don't support context.xml files. It would be great
if we did but that would require quite a bit more work.
thanks
david jencks
Anything incorrect, please hop in.
thanks
Jeff C
On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 8:50 AM, David Jencks
<[email protected]> wrote:
IMO our way of configuring the tomcat server using server.xml is
working fine and the main remaining bits are really documentation.
Since I am terrible at documentation I hope others will take it upon
themselves to help with it :-)
I'd like to see
-- a list of stuff that doesn't work in geronimo. My recollection
is that the main things that don't work are configuring jndi (such
as deploying datasources) and realms (this might actually work, I'm
not sure).
-- at least one sample of how to use it. I think a good starting
point would the the app-per-port sample that shows how to have 2 web
apps each exposed on a different port. This requires setting up 2
entire tomcat servers and I think would be a nice example of the
simplicity of the server.xml configuration compared with the gbeans
we used up till now. I think I'd consider deploying the server.xml
in a plugin that completely replaces the existing tomcat plugin.
thoughts?
many thanks
david jencks
