>> If we dropped the web app descriptor environment var approach and stored
the
>> bundle name in an application scoped variable, how would you recommend we
>> make sure it gets set before the first page is hit?
Wong Kok Wai wrote
> By reading from a property file in the constructor?
I assume you're suggesting a hardcoded property file in the constructor of
the localize tag. There are a number of problems with this approach:
1. the property file needs to be in a relative location depending upon the
deployment of the web application -- I may well want different defaults for
different web apps
2. the web app may well be in a WAR file or even doubly nested in an EAR
file. the only way to safely get this info would be to use a resource
bundle and place it in the classpath somewhere -- probably in
WEB-INF/classes/ -- but this is (1) pretty ugly from a maintainability
standpoint (2) if we're going to use a hardcoded resource bundle, why have
the resource bundle point me to another resource bundle -- why not just
hardcode the resource bundle that needs to be used by the i18n library? :-)
3. the tags are often cached or pooled by the servlet container & reused.
you can't necessarily count on the constructor being called for the tag on
each page, and some pages may want to provide a specific bundle while others
use the default.
and finally...
4. it's too hardcoded & unobvious. the servlet spec specifically points out
that the env-entry portion of the deployment descriptor is supposed to be
used for "allowing a servlet to obtain references to resources".
It seems to me that the potential cures are worse than the disease.
Besides, as the doctor says "if it hurts, don't do it". You can always just
specify which bundle each time you use the tag if you're really concerned
using JNDI. Or we could just remove the default bundle feature altogher... I
never liked it that much anyway. :-)
Tim
