As I read the discussion, I don't think that anyone claimed that only WAR's are interesting or important.
Yoav, in one posting, explained that the servlet spec is written from a point of view that only requires support for applications in unexploded WAR files. That is not the same thing as stating that only WARs are interesting. It is just a way of illuminating some requirements for behaviors of the container. In another posting, Yoav expressed a generic distaste for Global resources -- all other things being equal. Of late, there's been a rash of people wanting to use global resources, either for database pooling or for JNI reasons. The commercial containers have various kinds of adminstrative UI arrangements for this purpose. No one that I know of supports a self-contained package that bundles a web app with administrative/resource/global configuration, but I haven't made a comprehensive survey. Semi-seriously, I wonder about a GRaR -- a Global Resource aRchive, as a way to package up a set of global classlibs and the config to deploy them into JNDI. I've experimented with writing a simple Java command-line application to set up an application with global resources. It assumes that the app will deploy outside the webapps dir. It edits server.xml and creates the context file to point to the tree. It wasn't very complex. I have some ideas as to why them-that-vote are not enthused about META-INF/server.xml as a generic feature of a web application tree. If there is also context file in Catalina/HOST/xxx.xml, which one wins? How loudly will someone yell when a WAR file has unexpected implications because it has a server.xml? As things are, META-INF/server.xml is a feature of a particular management path, not a feature of webapps. Mostly, I end up feeling that this is more of a documentation problem. Developer after developer reads the servlet spec, which is quite murky in this area since it defers important stuff to the container. Then, they either never read the relevant tomcat howtos, or fail to understand them. As a recent contributor to them I get some of the blame for the later turn of events. In big letters, someplace, people need to see 'if your webapp needs resources from the container, and especially if you need container-wide shared resources, you are not in Kansas any longer'. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
