Daniel Krieg wrote:
On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 03:27, Stephen McConnell wrote:
The *really* *really* valuable stuff are details of the problems you had. Even if they were silly things - even if they were documeted - that fact that you had problems is valuable material. If you detail what those problems were we can get specific about enhancing things.Here is a short list of things off the top of my head...
1. !Lowest-hanging fruit!: no DTD for the block.xml -- many of my problems could have been avoided by having this. I use IDEAJ which gives intelli-sense options when the DOCTYPE is included with xml.
We have a problem here:
<component type="com.whatever.MyComponent" name="whatever">
<configuration>
<!-- stuff I cannot include if we have a block DTD -->
</configuration>
</component>
But we could come up with a block verifier goal.
(i.e. a Maven goal that scans a block.xml file for integrity and reports any errors).
2. Confused by the xtype files produced by ant MetaTask when all
documentation and tutorials discuss xinfo files.
Have been thinking about this since your email.
We could easily place a switch on the meta generator to control the default output extension. The default would be xinfo but a switch would enable xtype when needed.
3. The website does not yet include a description of how the repository
directory is to be used. I think it is modeled after Maven is it not? This might be good to know. Mostly, I had to build and run the tutorial to understand even a little. I would like it to make more sense just through reading.
Documentation on the repository is missing - and its an important ommission that needs to be addressed ASAP.
The repository is maven-like in structure - but I want to see a lot more emphasis on secure validation of content (i.e. more along the lines of JNLP full signing of jar files in the repository and signature verification). This will probably require a complete JNLP implementation within the repository handlers.
4. I don't understand the order of importance when packaging a JAR that
is placed in the repository directory. The relationships between the xtype, xservice, xconfig, xprofile, and block.xml is not clear, epecially when another block establishes its engine classloader with
this JAR as a repository resource, has a dependency that this packaged block provides as a service, and would like to override the
configuration via the CLI option -config! (You confused yet?)
ROTFL
:-)
Actually, I understand what you wrote. Its the view of what is happening when a bunch of different packaging and assembly noptions are brought together in real work use. I hope to address many of these point with the James example documetation in which I plan to use things like block includes, service exporting, etc. So hopefully that will address many of the points your describing above.
5. I would like to be able to control the logging priority of my components but have not yet figured out how to change this. The tutorials nor the website demonstrate this -- whereas there are examples of using -debug to show kernel debug output.
All debug does is switch the internal merlin logging priority to DEBUG. It is really helpful when debuging the internals of Merlin but is also helpful when debugging a deployment scenario. Aside from that - yes - a logging management tutorial is needed.
I'll include the above topics in the list of pre-release actions (i.e. higher priority stuff).
I would be happy to continue to assemble my questions and put them on the wiki if appropriate.
Please do.
Cheers, Steve.
--
Stephen J. McConnell mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.osm.net
Sent via James running under Merlin as an NT service. http://avalon.apache.org/sandbox/merlin
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