On Sep 14, 2007, at 4:28 PM, Dario Laverde wrote:
Karan, thanks for updating the (Tomcat) New Instructions page (I
just needed to know
how you did the lookup), however:
Placing the restrictions up top like that will just scare off users
- the
implication is that it won't work on Windows. I think the
instructions can be
reduced to a few simple steps (and you should probably skip all the
Tomcat
installation steps)
1) unzip openejb-tomcat-3.x.x-SNAPSHOT-bin.zip into the Tomcat's
webapps folder
(btw no need to start/stop Tomcat at this point)
2) Non-Windows users: go to http://localhost:8080/openejb/install
Windows users: a) remove Tomcat's lib/annotations-api.jar (add
an explanation here)
b) edit Tomcat's bin/catalina.bat file ....
If you can document the changes that need to be made to the
catalina.bat file, I can add them to the installer code. Also to
avoid the windows locking problem, we could remove the annotations-
api.jar in the bat file since it runs before the server starts (and
locks the files).
3) restart Tomcat
caveats:
- There is no security integration
- Injection is work in progress.. i.e. @EJB, @Resource,
@PersistenceContext...
As for the remark "support older versions of Tomcat if there were
enough demand, but
it is doubtful there will be since OpenEJB 3 requires Java5", well
Tomcat 5.5 runs
on Java5 and is still quite prevalent (many sites/hosting providers
will not move to
Tomcat 6 until 6.1).
If you have the time, it would be great to get 5.5 going also.
So I gave it a try on 5.5 and got the "LifeCyle" class (from
catalina.jar) not found
via the webapp classloader.
Looking at the code, we only use this class to get some constant
values which could be inlined:
public interface Lifecycle {
public static final String INIT_EVENT = "init";
public static final String START_EVENT = "start";
public static final String BEFORE_START_EVENT = "before_start";
public static final String AFTER_START_EVENT = "after_start";
public static final String STOP_EVENT = "stop";
public static final String BEFORE_STOP_EVENT = "before_stop";
public static final String AFTER_STOP_EVENT = "after_stop";
public static final String DESTROY_EVENT = "destroy";
public static final String PERIODIC_EVENT = "periodic";
// snip
Probably a dumb question, but could 5.5 be supported as
well if we added all the OpenEJB jars into Tomcat's lib folder?
Class loading is only one aspect of the integration. We also need to
hook deployment so we can support annotations and other things like
JPA. The OpenEJBListener lets us know when each Web context is
loaded, so can preprocess the application before tomcat loads any
classes.
Which begs the
question, is OpenEJB a feature request to be streamlined into
Tomcat in the future?
Isn't that what we are doing now? A very clean and simple
integration into Tomcat.
And what exactly is the story behind annotations-api.jar at Tomcat
anyway (why is
there)?
It is the annotation classes that Tomcat needs so it can process
annotations on servlet classes. The jar is a hodgepodge of classes
from the commons annotations, ejb, jpa, and webservice specs. The
jar was developed over time based on changes from the different
committees. The problem is they missed some changes and have
deviated from the specs in a few cases, which causes stuff like
OpenJPA to blow up when the Tomcat annotation classes are present.
-dain
