On Apr 16, 2008, at 7:42 AM, Xasima Xirohata wrote:
Hello, I have an EAR that expect to load a bunch of parameters
from special 'property' folder (folder/performance-prop.property,
folder/logging-prop.property and so on).
The resolving of these properties is done in the following manner
url = ClassLoader.getSystemResource
("relativePathToPropertyFile");
so classes just look into classpath for the relative path of
certain property file, and the only I need is to put this property
folder into classpath of the application server.
This seems to me to be a really strange way of exposing application
specific data and I'm very surprised that any application server
caters to this method. Why would you want to have to modify the
classpath of the app server (not your app, the app server) in order
to expose what is quite clearly application specific data? This
seems extraordinarily non-modular to me.
When testing this EAR with WAS 6.1, I just set the path to this
'property' folder using VirtualMashine/Process Definition/ClassPath
tab in WAS 6.1 administration console.
When migrate to Geronimo 2.1 (bundled with jetty6, java 1.5 vm), I
have experienced the following difficulties.
I haven't found any way to add some data to classpath from Geronimo
Administration Console, so I tried to set up this manually.
I created the 'setenv.bat' in the %geronimo_home%/bin with the
following content
set GERONIMO_OPTS="-Djava.ext.dirs=C:
\path2propertiesfolder1;C:\path2propertyfolder2" (actually I have
several properties folder),
but this didn't help so I have pass this options directly into the
geronimo.bat where @REM Execute Java with the applicable properties
I've noticed that Administration Console (http://localhost:8080/
console/portal/Server/Java%20System%20Info) never lists the values
that set up with such an approach.
The file var/log/geronimo.log doesn't list them as well, although
when a deploying occurs, this values appear into deployer.log. Thus
it seems that geronimo_opts really is used only at deployment.
But no above efforts are sufficient to make this folder visible
for my application.
I know that this is possible to set up classpath using eclipse
plugin. We have tested this with WAS CE 1.x (server -> open -> edit-
launch-configuration-properties -> user entries -> advanced -> add
folder).
I wonder what's the proper approach to set up the same with no
eclipse assistance.
I guess the following ways to do this that probably may help,
although haven't tried them yet
1) packed the PropertiesFolder as jar and place into %geronimo_home
%/lib/endorsed
2) packed the folder as jar and write a deployment plan to install
this into geronimo repository in the similar way as for common DB-
Pool. After this we probably need to declare special dependency in
regular EAR application / geronimo-application .xml onto group-
artifact-resourcejar to list this as resource.
3) use some special way to deploy (install) application with custom
classpath, and do this in local manner (just special options when
deploy, or using some maven-plugins) not global .bat file rewritting.
I think that the last options is the best one. Assume the
situation if someone has different application that are supposed to
be configured with some properties files and these files are
located in different places. It's too unnatural to move this data
into application server lib or repository , since this is not
suitable for user access and configuration.
Could someone please clear out the rules of classpath resolution?
As you can tell, I'm not in favor of allowing anyone to change the
system classpath as a way to access application specific data.
There's some documentation on what I at least consider appropriate
ways of locating your app's configuration info:
http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDOC21/locating-your-application-specific-
configuration-files.html
If you have further questions pleas ask!
thanks
david jencks
--
Best regards,
~ Xasima ~
