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From: Brendan W.McAdams <bmcadams@sluggy.com>
Subject: Re: ?Enhanced? Lifecycle Interface for Application Developers
Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 14:28:03 -0400
To: geronimo-dev@incubator.apache.org
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Out of curiosity, What events will be supported, and at what level? 
(E.g. Application only, or sub module lifecycles?)
---
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 2, 2004, at 1:54 PM, Dain Sundstrom wrote:

> I plan on implementing this with GBeans, but it can't be done with 
> depenencies.  I plan on supporting this by adding a general purpose 
> event listener system to GBeans.  Since JSR-77 already defines 
> life-cycle events that match up to your proposed interface it should 
> be trivial to implement (once I add the not so trivial event system).
>
> -dain
>
> On May 1, 2004, at 6:18 PM, Brendan W.McAdams wrote:
>
>> 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"
>>>
>>
>