Vikram Goyal wrote:
Besides, there are several complexities with the plugging in other servlet containers. I am not sure how many of you have ever tried to integrate Tomcat with Apache or tried to embed Tomcat as part of an application. The embedding makes the control pass on to another applications space, in which we have no control or say. Ideally that should be the case, after all that is what OO is all about. However, an integrated engine, developed within the confines of the complete J2EE engine has a better likelihood of being robust, modular and performing better.
Which is why I am proposing using Jetty as the first implementation. Jetty's bread and butter is integrating into other applications/platforms. As the lead developer of Jetty, if there is something that prevents it from being embedded in Geronimo is a robust, modular and efficient way, then that is a fault in Jetty and I will fix it.
Note that I believe that under the hood - tomcat is also flexible and embedable and should be able to equally integrated. It is just that this has not been tomcats main focus and any required changes will be of less priority for them. But I'm sure it will get done.
The approach that I wish to take - is to firstly define geronimos own view of what are web containers, connectors and applications and to capture that in the AbstractWebContainer layer. This will be focused on what geronimo needs as a complete J2EE engine and will not pander to any particular implementation.
Then if the jetty/tomcat implementations of this are not suitable robust, modular and efficient - we can consider a geronimo native implementation. I may even consider donating Jetty to apache to assist with this - but I think this is WAY too early to think about such things.
But I take your point - use of external implementations should not be allowed to be an excuse for not having a top class, seamlessly integrated J2EE compliant web tier withing geronimo.
regards
