On Sun, 3 Oct 2004, David Jencks wrote:
> I agree this is inconvenient.  The solutions I know of are:
> ...

	I'm more worried about the general-purpose case where you have 5
connectors in the server and each of 3 apps requires a different subset of
them.  I don't think there's a way to make that work with either of the
methods you suggested.  You'd have to deploy each app with the connectors
it uses and just sacrifice the potential to pool connections across
applications.

	If we were going to try to make this work, I wouldn't try to 
construct an app classloader with multiple parent classloaders, I'd 
instead create an "RA ClassLoader" for the app that included all the RA 
JARs for all the RAs that the application depends on.  So in essence, 
you'd get:

normal parent CL (o/a/g/System?)
      |
App's RA CL (references JAR URLs from RAs)
      |
App's normal CL

That way the parent of the app could be whatever, and we could tell from 
the resource mappings what RA's the app requires (and perhaps let you list 
additional ones explicitly), and during app deployment we could silently 
construct the RA CL for you and insert that "above" the rest of your 
application.  We could do a similar thing for web apps that depend on EJB 
JARs (normal parent - RA CL - EJB CL - web app) too.  That would be nice 
because it would pretty much eliminate the need to manually specify this 
ClassLoader hierarchy in your Geronimo deployment plan -- everything could 
default to the parent o/a/g/System and we'd auto-wire the obvious 
dependencies and everything ought to "just work".

	Of course, I'm not sure this would really work in practice -- but
it seems like it has some potential.  I'd really like to avoid needing to
manually configure all the parentIds properly in order for your app to
work.

Aaron

> 
> 1. make a chain Server --- Connector1 --- Connector2 --- MyApp
> 
> 2. put everything (both connectors and MyApp) in an ear.
> 
> I think there are 2 cases here.
> 
> If you need the connector classes on the MyApp classpath, then I think 
> the solutions (1,2) are sufficient.  Otherwise we will have to write 
> some bizarre classloader with several parent classloaders, that most 
> likely won't work reliably.
> 
> If you simply need the connectors started and available before MyApp 
> starts, this could be taken care of by some kind of explicit dependency 
> mechanism.  So far I haven't thought of a reasonable way to do this, 
> but I think it would be possible and convenient.