> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam Connors [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 5:25 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [NEWBIE]: Getting started with Fortress / Excalibur / Thread
> pooling.
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> Sorry for so many questions in one go! Please take pity on someone just
> starting out with avalon.

We all know how it is to start out.  If you have any suggestions on
documentation or tutorials to make it easier, please let us know!

> 
> 1) Which container?
> 
> Fortress would be my first choice. The home page says it's not released
> yet, but it is available as a 1.0 binary so I assume this is just out of
> date docs. Is this true?

Yes, Fortress 1.0 has been released.  The web site needs updated.

> Given the fresh release and the lack of documentation does it make sense
> for me to use Fortress? Or should I stick with Excalibur? Or something
> else? What is the intended time-scale for filling in some of the gaps in
> the Fortress docs?

My first recommendation is to NOT go with ECM (Excalibur Container Manager).
Most of ECM has been deprecated and replaced with Fortress.

Merlin has a lot of very nice features but the API is still somewhat
unstable.  Hopefully a release will be out soon (sometime this summer).

Phoenix is stable but not as easy to embed.

So your best bet is Fortress.

However, if you write the application correctly, then you should be able to
migrate between containers without too much trouble.  The major differences
will be deployment descriptors (meta-info and configuration files).  So what
you want to do is make sure for the majority of your application, you are
ONLY dependant on avalon-framework.  In fact, if you use Fortress, you
really only need one class file to import any Fortress specific dependencies
and this would be whatever class initializes the default Fortress container.
If this is not clear, let me know and I'll try to clarify.

> 2) Running the Fortress Hello World demo.
> 
> a) Unable to load class warnings
> 
> This all compiled and ran fine but I did get some warnings like this:
> 
> WARN    2003-07-15 13:06:45.392 [fortress.system.roles.de] (): Unable to
> load class org.apache.excalibur.xml.xpath.XPathProcessorImpl. Skipping.

Fortress attempts to load a number of excalibur services by default.  This
is purely for convenience.  All you need to do to take advantage of them is
include them in your classpath (and add any configuration info).  There was
talk about a way to suppress these warnings, but I'm not sure how that ended
up.  

> There is something in the mail archive about this which suggests replacing
> the DefaultRoleManager: http://www.mail-
> archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg00009.html

Fortress has moved to using a MetaInfoManager to handle role related
information.  The RoleManager is there mostly to provide legacy support for
ECM applications.  In most cases you should not need to override or extend
the role manager or meta manager.  If you think this is necessary, you might
want to post your use case to the list.  Perhaps there's another way to
accomplish what you need.

> b) Log4j support.

I'm afraid logging support is not my specialty.  I've been happy to use
LogKit so far.  Perhaps someone else could help with this one.

> 3) Thread pooling.
> 
> One of the most compelling offerings from avalon is an off the shelf
> thread pool for handling requests. But the docs for excalibur thread pools
> say that these aren't released yet. What is the expected release date? Is
> there anything I can use in the meantime? Is there a How-To, or could
> anyone provide me with a simple example of using this feature?
> 
> Of course, its quite possible to create a component that implements
> Runnable, then give this component a poolable lifestyle... This gave me
> roughly the behaviour I was looking for, but feels like a bit of a hack.
> Would this be recommended?

I've mostly used the util-concurrent package for my threading needs.  I'm
not certain of the excalibur thread pool status.

> Apologies if these are daft questions, I am suffering from the infamous
> avalon learning curve. Any help with these would be greatly appreciated.

My hope is to put together more documentation to help curb that learning
curve.  So any thoughts or feedback you have would also be appreciated.  

Just to let you know, I recently ported an application at my workplace to
Avalon and it went extremely well.  I put some of the results on our wiki
site: http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?AvalonTestimonials

So I think Avalon would be a perfect choice for your application.  Good
Luck!

jaaron 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to