On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Jeremy Boynes wrote:
> So for 88 to be useful, the vendor must support having all their DD
> information in one file? But the RI does not that...
Now you are being dense. You have to be able to transport it over
the network in one stream. Is that so onerous? Whatever format you use
for that, you would probably also use for your save files. The
information does not need to permanently live in one file on the server
side. You can split it out into one file per byte once it gets to the
server side. Or stuff in in a database. Or update the EAR to contain it.
Or whatever.
> Hmmm. Most vendors have implemented a mechanism where the DD information
> for a module is in that module as one or more XML files in META-INF; and
> for EARs, the top level file describes the EAR itself, the module level
> files are in each nested module archive's META-INF.
The J2EE spec team wanted to explicitly discourage developers from
putting deployment information into the EAR. Why that is, I couldn't say.
Thus, we have all this plumbing so the server can automagically handle the
deployment information without the user even needing to manually generate,
copy, or package it.
> The only ones I can think of that are different are the old (deprecated)
> RI and maybe WebSphere with it's separate repository.
Well, one counter-case is enough. The vendors didn't want to be
restricted to a particular format for deployment information, even one as
common as XML. So it's a file/stream, with which you can do what you
will.
Aaron
