Alan Cabrera was kind enough to point out a good question: Why not use 
GBeans?

There was another component to the conversation regarding this which I 
neglected to include:  It *IS* possible to interface the GBeans for 
lifecycle, but from what I understand there isn't "orderly"  
deployment.  I don't know this section of things too well, but from 
what I understand there is a necessity to define various dependencies 
if you were to use Gbeans for this.

By defining a LifecycleInterface, conceivably dependencies could be 
configured on the fly based on the modules defined in application.xml

Dain & Jeremy, can you guys backfill this a bit?  I'll go back through 
the IRC log as well and pull up that piece of the conversation.

Thanks,

Brendan
---
Brendan W. McAdams
bmcadams@twodot.org

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, 
I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free 
because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I 
do."				--- Professor Bernardo de La Paz
			     Robert A. Heinlein "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"
On May 1, 2004, at 6:46 PM, Brendan W.McAdams wrote:

> I'm doing my best to collate some of the information provided here by 
> several people ; it's my hope they will put in their two cents as well 
> in reply and straighten out any misquotes I may make, and help flesh 
> this idea out.
>
> I had a conversation with Jeremy Boynes on Thursday Night, to which 
> Dain gave some input on Friday morning, regarding some of the 
> Application Level Lifecycle interfacing that BEA provides in their 
> Weblogic product.
>
> Using the weblogic-application.xml file (Weblogic's custom supplement 
> to application.xml for EAR files), one is able to define a Lifecycle 
> application (or more than one ; there is no limit) which implements a 
> basic Lifecycle interface:
>
> preStart - before contents (modules) of application (EAR) are loaded, 
> this method is invoked
> postStart - after all contents (modules - ejbs, etc) are loaded and 
> initialised, this method is invoked
> preStop - when the application (or encompassing appserver) signals it 
> is being stopped, this is invoked before signalling modules to stop
> postStop - once all modules in the application have been shut down, 
> this method is invoked
>
> As I stated, once you've written a class that implements the interface 
> and these methods, you simply declare it in a <lifecycle> block in 
> weblogic-application.xml.  When the EAR file is deployed, the 
> AppServer automatically picks up the Lifecycle app, and sends each 
> change of status (one of the four) notification through it.
>
> I realise it may sound like I'm rambling but I do have a point... I 
> think that a similar facility would help Geronimo greatly.
>   As a usage example, we use it at my company to preload the entity 
> cache with the approximately 15,000 bond offers that are active in our 
> marketplace at a given time.  [This way, we load the entity cache 
> before the system is available, preventing 'database load' slowdown 
> the first time someone does a large market search].  We are also using 
> it to initialise certain timer events, and fire off events to our 
> Message Driven Beans to setup the marketplace.  There are, I am sure, 
> plenty of other beneficial uses that we haven't even begun to touch 
> on.
>
> The conversations with Jeremy and Dain  yielded some good feedback , 
> and I believe they agree with the idea.
>
> One of the things suggested [by Jeremy] was allowing lifecycle 
> definitions even at the level of individual modules of an application, 
> to do more fine tuned control.
>
> On the same lines, we discussed allowing access from the lifecycle 
> level to the Local interfaces; from what I understand of the EJB 
> container contract it's ok to let other services in the appserver 
> access local interfaces [BEA doesn't allow it directly but  instead 
> optimises away the RMI calls on any remote bean invocation within the 
> AppServer].  This would certainly make the lifecycle even more 
> powerful [in our case for Beans which are Local only, our lifecycle 
> invokes a session bean to do the job].
>
> I believe I've put a good bit of the information compiled here, of 
> course if anyone has feedback please post it back to the list.
>
> Regards,
>
> Brendan
> ---
> Brendan W. McAdams
> bmcadams@twodot.org
>
> "I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them 
> tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break 
> them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for 
> everything I do."				--- Professor Bernardo de La Paz
> 			     Robert A. Heinlein "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"
>