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Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:50:46 -0500
From: Tim Kettering <timster.lists@gmail.com>
To: user@geronimo.apache.org
Subject: tying together various components w/ gbeans and spring?
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hi everyone.. this is more of a "lets fling this into the list and see
if anyone bites" question on architectural ideas/suggestions regarding
tying together an componentized application using geronimo.  hopefully
i dont make this too long-winded.

we've been deploying our product as a single webapp on tomcat, but as
things have gotten bigger and more complex, its become more bothersome
for the developers to constantly have to build and redeploy the whole
damn application when all they did was add a log statement to xyz
class.

so i've been looking into options to make the dev process easier, and
also to break down the application into more modular components (ooh,
a buzzword!), which is something we should be doing anyway.

after looking at servicemix, i ended up at geronimo.. although they're
wholly different beasts, i've started looking at geronimo more closely
to see if it could become the app server of our choice. i like how it
brings together ldap, jms, jta, yadda yadda under a common
umbrealla... i've come up with some stuff to deploy plans, .wars and
all that jazz, and i'm quite excited by the parent-child options that
makes shaping the classloader hiearchy somewhat more elegantly and
spiffy than the tomcat structure alone.

but enough background information, now to the burning questions.  lets
say we have a package of core biz functionality.  call it=20
foo-core.jar.   it doesn't relate to the web-ui at all.  i can deploy
this to geronimo as a deployment plan, stick it in the classloader and
give it a configuration name, then deploy a .war file as a child of
that configuration and it'll pick up the classes from the parent.=20
that's rather nice.

however i tried redeploying the core .jar again (while the webapp
continues to run) - and it seems to shut down the child web-app when i
do that.  is this standard functionality?  i would have expected it to
reload at least.  i was not able to find any documentation that covers
how gbean lifecycle are affected by parent gbeans.

next thing i looked at was deploying foo-core.jar wrapped around a
gbean as a server module.  i hooked things up so that when foo-core
gets deployed, the internal spring application context in foo-core.jar
is started up and initalized.   my intention then was to somehow
introduce that context into the webapp (and hopefully not having to
use any geronimo specific stuff in the webapp code).

i had been thinking something along the lines of deploying various
application components as gbeans, then the webapp itself could pick up
the references to those gbeans when it starts up.  by components, i
mean foo-core,  ldap reference, a jms reference, and datasource
references, to name a few.

i read up on how to do dependency injection w/ gbeans - and have been
able to accomplish that, but what im wondering is if anyone here has
figured out a good way to get those gbeans included in a spring
context that the webapp starts up as well?

lets say foo-webapp has a spring context that is started up when the
webapp starts up.  ideally i'd like this spring context to be able to
obtain the various gbeans that are set in the server and make them
available as beans in the context.  has anyone done this, or could
anyone offer some ideas/suggestions on how that might be done?

i will continue to work this angle - and share any answers i might by
miracle discover, considering my very amateur understanding of this
geronimo thing here.  :)

-tim