On Sun, 25 Jan 2004, Jeremy Boynes wrote:
> A couple of things in the JSR 88 API don't make sense to me - if anyone
> has definitive answers I would appreciate it.
>
> On distribute(), what exactly is the "deploymentPlan" passed in? I am
> assuming that it is the tool's responsibility to pass in a
> File/InputStream containing the information written by
> DeploymentConfiguraton.save(OutputStream).
It is all the server-specific deployment information. What
traditionally goes in the server DDs. But not all servers use DDs, so XML
is not mandated here. It can be binary info or XML or whatever.
> If this is the case, how is the information for an EAR module tied
> together?
More on this later.
> As I understand EAR deployment:
> * the tool constructs a J2eeApplicationObject from the EAR's DD
> * the tool invokes DeploymentManager.createConfiguration() to
> construct the DeploymentConfiguration for the EAR
> * for each DeployableObject (sub-module) in the EAR, the tool calls
> DeploymentConfiguration.getDConfigBeanRoot(DDBeanRoot) to get the
> DConfigBeanRoot that it uses to configure the sub-module
Yes.
> At this point things get fuzzy. Presumably the tool iterates over all
> these DConfigBeanRoot's and uses saveDConfigBean(OutputStream,
> DConfigBeanRoot) to save the configuration information. However, the
> tool gets to choose the location where the information is written (as it
> creates the OutputStream).
>
> Now when the tool goes to distribute this application, it would pass the
> plugin the File/InputStream for the EAR and the File/InputStream for the
> EAR's deployment plan. How does it communicate to the plugin the
> location of the DD's for all the sub-modules?
The tool would call DeploymentConfiguration.save() [with no
argument] which would save all the deployment information for the EAR to
one file. That would be used as the Deployment Plan. Likewise, it could
reload that with restore (no argument).
It may be that the server plugin uses different formats for
saveing a single DConfigBeanRoot vs an EAR -- perhaps the
save(DConfigBeanRoot) saves a single XML DD, and the save() saves a
serialized Map relating modules to DDs, or a grand unified XML with
children for each DD/module pair, or whatever.
Aaron
