You're not reading this wrong. I'm advocating creating 50 webapps (and 50
war files) if you have 50 sites.
But I've always felt that disk space and server memory are cheap compared
to developer time. CPU requirements would likely be the same with either
approach.
Don't run from ghosts - that is, don't spend a lot of effort programming
around hardware limitations that don't exist or that can be eliminated by a
few hundred dollars in parts. Developer time is the critical resource - not
hardware.
I believe that this approach (driving the site customization at build-time
versus run-time) will give you a simpler codebase that's likely to be
eaiser (i.e. faster) to develop.
However, if you want to drive the customization at run-time, you could do
so with a similar approach:
- Still drive every thing that is site-specific from properties.
- Create a cache of Properties objects (or ResourceBundles) in a Hashmap
that gets loaded at start-up (and potentially allow for dynamic reload
without restarting the server). These Properties objects would contain all
site-specific values.
- To build the View (i.e. jsp) for each request retrieve the Properties
object containing the propery values for that site based on some lookup
driven by the url/uri requested.
- You could create a <SetSiteProperties> tag that attached the Properties
object to the Request with some known attribute name - this type of
behavior occurs throughout Struts so you could find examples somewhere in
the code.
- Then the html output is customized by the Properties.
Gosh - now that I look at this, it doesn't look that hard either....
What do you think?
Mike Karl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 05/13/2002 07:07:07 PM
Please respond to "Struts Users Mailing List"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Struts Users Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc: (bcc: Kevin Bedell/Systems/USHO/SunLife)
Subject: Re: Multiple sites using one struts application.
Would this then build me an application for each site? So it would copy
the files over for each site. I don't know that this is viable because
I have 50 or so sites that would be running on one server. What I would
like is just one set of files running at a time and not 50 so that I
could save on server resources. Or am I reading this wrong.
thanks
mike
On Mon, 2002-05-13 at 15:31, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>
>
>
> I believe this is a build/deploy question as much as a Struts question.
But
> here goes:
>
> 1. Drive virtually everything from your application.properties file. All
> these properties are available to your Action classes. For example,
define
> the path to your images directory there, the club name, the jdbc url,
etc.)
>
> 2. Create each site as it's own web app - but keep everything in a SINGLE
> SOURCE CONTROL REPOSITORY version. You will create specific sites ONLY AT
> BUILD TIME. Again - only one version exists in source control. Call this
> The Template.
>
> This is critical. No site-specific code or properties get checked in
> with The Template. Everything is driven from the application.properties
> file.
>
> 3. Define the values in this application.properties file using "tokens",
> not actual values. For example:
>
> in The Template application.properties for Struts:
>
> club.name=CLUB_NAME
> path.to.images=IMAGE_PATH
> site.jdbc.url=JDBC_URL
>
> - etc. -
>
> 4. Then, for each actual site, create a seperate "properties" file
> containing the specific values for that site. For example:
>
> in "club1.properties"
>
> club.name=Fred's Club
> path.to.images=/fredimages/images
> site.jdbc.url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@123.45.67.89:1521:orcl"
>
> - etc. -
>
> 5. At build time, use Ant's "<replace>" target to replace the "tokens" in
> the struts application.properties file with the site-specific values from
> the site-specific properties files. That is:
>
>
> <replace
> file="path/to/struts/application.properties"
> propertyFile="path/to/specific/club.properties" >
> <replacefilter
> token="CLUB_NAME"
> property="club.name"/>
> <replacefilter
> token="IMAGE_PATH"
> property="path.to.images"/>
> <replacefilter
> token="JDBC_URL"
> property="site.jdbc.url"/>
> </replace>
>
>
> See details on the Ant <replace> tag at:
http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/manual/CoreTasks/replace.html
>
> 6. Create a different ant target to build each site. And maybe a
"build-all" to build all the sites.
>
> There's a bit of work here getting things organized. But this will
allow you to generate sites from The Template as a build/configuration
process
> - not as a development issue.
>
> Summary:
>
> 1. Drive EVERYTHING site specific from the application.properties file
> 2. Use tokens in the application.properties file instead of actual
values
> 3. Create the actual sites at build/deploy time using Ant and the
<replace> target.
>
> This will work!
>
>
> FWIW -
> Kevin
>
>
>
>
>
> Mike Karl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 05/13/2002 04:51:36 PM
>
> Please respond to "Struts Users Mailing List"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> cc: (bcc: Kevin Bedell/Systems/USHO/SunLife)
> Subject: Multiple sites using one struts application.
>
>
> Hello,
> I'm building a site for a group of clubs. All the sites will have the
> same set of pages and actions.
>
> For instance:
>
> http://clubsites/club1/index.jsp
> http://clubsites/club2/index.jsp
> http://clubsites/club3/index.jsp
> http://anothersite/club4/index.jsp
>
> All of these sites would basically be the same in terms of layout and
> functionality except that the would have different images. They may
> also connect to seperate database. How can I set up a site like this so
> that I can use the same pages for all of the clubs but pass different
> configurations so that I can render the pages with their own images.
>
> thanks
> mike
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Montana Connect
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