Jason Dillon wrote:
Imagine that rather than having a set number of configurations which all load every service at startup, Geronimo could load just the components needed to provide the services required by your deployables...
I like the concept, but I am not sure how easy this will be to actually implement. To make something like this work, we would need to load configuration metadata for everything on boot, so that we knew what components we had to work with. I mean, how else would the component container know which components it had to work with to start the services required by the deployable?
Within the Avalon Merlin system this is managed using a meta-data model that enables the construction of component type managers. The manager (an Appliance in Merlin terminology) represents a one-to-one mapping with a identifiable deployment scenario. The manager is also responsible for instance creation - so its here that you can get the benefits of lazy activation.
e.g. you are doing web development, so when you start Geronimo it just loads the webcontainer component and deploys your webapp. You webapp decides to load a javax.naming class so the JNDI service is brought on line, it loads a javax.mail class and looks up a mail service in JNDI - the mail service is brought up... etc
Sounds like a lot of complex magic inside to achieve lazy loading.
My guess is that you would end up with a set of notions covering type descriptors, deployment directives, a containment model, and management services. These facilities will be needed anyway - so in principal the notion of lazy activation should be rather trivial if you have the infrastructure in place.
If we could lazily load services as required, startup time would be greatly reduced, footprint as well, and the distributions complexity too - since we could just ship everything and only what was needed would be used.
Initial startup time may be reduced, but if an app requires JNDI, JavaMail or whatever, then the time initialize these will not change, we have just moved where that time is spent.
I do like the concept, but I think this may not be feasible in the short-term... though it would depend a lot on what we use for component management I would say.
There is the other-side of the lazy activation equation - namely aggressive disposal. Lazy activation is basically making sure that a component that implements a service is not introduced until it is actually needed. Aggressive disposal is about getting rid of service implementations that are no longer needed.
Personally I do not believe that this buys us all that much. While lazy loading may (or may not) be nice during development, in a production environment I would rather have a slow startup where all of my components are initialized and connected.
Naturally - putting lazy activation and aggressive disposal together makes for an interesting combination in a production environment.
On the other hand, if the component container had knowledge of the available components/services, then was asked to deploy a web-app, which requires a web-container, JNDI, whatever, then then container could initialize and start these components automatically with out having to explicitly list them as components to be started when the server comes up.
Just a note here - using this approach (sucking in automatically) can be problamatic because you can easily end up with an implementation which effectively delays deployment errors until a service is requested. One way of minimizing this to to do a complete validation of the feasibility of a potential deployment scenario ahead of deployment. This can get really interesting because you can introduce tools that simulate deployment at build time.
I think to make something like this work it would have to be done at a component connection/dependency level and will depend much on the component container we use or write.
Absolutely.
Stephen.
--jason
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Stephen J. McConnell mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.osm.net
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