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Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 13:22:58 +0100
Subject: Re: Geronimo Deployment Descriptors
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From: James Strachan <james_strachan@yahoo.co.uk>
To: geronimo-dev@incubator.apache.org
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On Monday, September 8, 2003, at 11:30  am, Greg Wilkins wrote:
> Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
>> On Monday, September 8, 2003, at 02:36 AM, Greg Wilkins wrote:
>>>>
>> [SNIP]
>>>
>>> But I don't want that to stop discussion while the code is being 
>>> written.
>>> I think what is best for web is bad for ejb and what is best for ejb 
>>> is bad
>>> for web - so Jeremy and I are a little entrenched in our view points 
>>> - and
>>> would appreciated input from others.
>>>
>> Are there any spec requirements that must be considered?
>
>
> Jeremy and I could not agree if there were or not :-)
>
> I think that it is agains the spirit (if not the letter) of the
> spec to ignore the contents of a standard DD just because of the
> presence of a vendor DD.
>
> Jeremy thinks that it is not, as he sees the generation of the
> vendor DD as being part of the deployment step.
>
> But if we do go with Jeremies model, we have agreed that the
> standard DD must at least be check for consistency with the
> geronimo DD - so it will not be ignored.


Quick question. While the J2EE specs might be moving away from the 
'embedding namespaced-extensions inside the standard XML descriptors' - 
is there anything in the spec anywhere which says a container cannot 
support it? i.e. could one of our options be to use our deployment 
extensions inside the standard deployment descriptors. This would avoid 
some of Gregs concerns - we can just use web.xml and ejb-jar.xml with 
our extensions inside it.

There seems to be a few different ways of skinning this particular cat 
and it seems to depend on your exact usage patterns. For developers 
wishing to target many different containers for a single deployment 
unit then making a standard deployment descriptor + extra container 
specific files seems the best approach. In this model a tool like 
XDoclet would probably be used and so the fact that duplicate stuff 
occurs in geronimo-ejb-jar.xml and ejb-jar.xml probably wouldn't be 
that much of an issue.

Another class of users could be those targeting just Geronimo - where 
they have no main need to also support other containers - in which case 
they may prefer to embed the Geronimo extensions directly inside 
web.xml or ejb-jar.xml etc.

The other option is Jeremy's approach, where the standard deployment 
descriptors remain completely clean & so guaranteed to work on any 
container - and the geronimo-*.xml overload them.

I can see all these approaches having value to users; so having a way 
for folks to configure Geronimo to suit their needs sounds like a good 
idea.

James
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