My feeling is that if you really want to have sub-apps be independent, why not leave them in separate .war files?
Any organization or project group that is large enough to have different people working on different parts of a given application (rather than having each application have its own maintainer-- a simpler and usually more efficient approach) is also large enough to develop their own practices for compartmentalizing or merging work and synchronizing deployments. If scalability of development is a serious concern, you definitely need some sharing mechanisms. I think that it's enough backward compatibility to make Struts 1.0 apps work as the default sub-app in a given deployment. Forcing all sub-apps to act like Struts 1.0 apps is a bit much in my opinion. In fact, a logical use of sub-apps would be to have a 1.0 app as the default application, and sub-apps be subsequent iterations of the original application that could co-exist in the same deployable unit. Sharing would be a good thing in that case ;) >From a certain aspect, the sub-app feature may be seen as allowing for a different type of application-- one that may morph arbitrarily from a set of norms according to the way it's invoked. Anyway, that's what I have to say until 1.1 Final on the subject-- I can shut up now :) -JT -----Original Message----- From: Craig R. McClanahan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 6:42 PM To: Struts Developers List Subject: Re: [Proposal] Sub-application inheritence Sharing *functionality* was not at all in the design goals I had originally. My view of the world was that sub-apps should be as self contained and independent as possible, in the same manner that webapps should be as self contained and independent as possible. The idea is that you can assemble individual subapps together, and also minimize the cross-sub-app dependencies that can complicate and slow down development. Not everyone agrees with this world view. Another, equally important to me, goal is that any existing Struts (1.0) app should be able to run in 1.1 by itself, or as a subapp, with zero changes to the struts-config.xml file. This is where life gets complicated with your proposal.
