Pier,
I wanted to ask you some questions about mod_webapp, and how you might see it working
with mod_jk. I seem to have become the default ajp13 / mod_jk expert, and people have
been asking for various extensions. I'm reluctant to invest much work in
mod_jk/ajp13, given that TC 4.0 is using mod_webapp. However, what would seem to make
sense to me would be the following course of action:
- Write connectors for TC 4.0 which talk ajp13, the mod_jk JNI protocol, and possibly
ajp12.
I would be very interested in doing this work. I believe it wouldn't take me very
long, given that I could adapt the current 3.3 code wholesale (much of which I
understand in detail). Then, TC 4.0 would suddenly be able to talk to all the web
servers which mod_jk talks to: Apache 1.3, Apache 2.0, Netscape, IIS, AOLServer. This
would be a huge win, and would (I believe) dramatically accelerate the adoption of TC
4. It would also provide a very smooth upgrade path to current users.
The only disadvantage would be that we wouldn't see any of the advantages of
mod_webapp. I've never seen a design doc for webapp, but my understanding is that one
of its big advantages is that it will directly read the web.xml (and server.xml)
files, which will greatly ease the configuration process. Could you possibly
summarize some of its other features?
The reason I ask is that I think the mod_jk C code (the various modules which plug
into the web servers), is actually extremely well-written and flexible. It's totally
undocumented, but, if necessary, I'd be willing to remedy that (I don't mind writing
documentation). One of the best things about that C code is that it allows many
different web servers to talk to many different protocols in a very clean way. So I
wonder if it would be possible to make it to also talk whatever protocol you're
developing as part of mod_webapp.
This would mean basically merging mod_webapp into mod_jk (or merging mod_jk into
mod_webapp, depending on your perspective ;-).
What do you think of this course of action? I'm hoping that you and I can align our
efforts so that we can take as much advantage of each other's work as possible.
-Dan
--
Dan Milstein // [EMAIL PROTECTED]
