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Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 12:02:55 -0700
From: Pierpaolo Fumagalli <pier@apache.org>
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Organization: Apache Software Foundation
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To: tomcat-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: request for review: server/config discussion
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Tom Clarke wrote:
> 
> How about we get a really good JSP/Servlet engine for V1 and go for a fully
> abstracted configuration architecture in V2?
> 
> What does it really buy us, apart from a really cool design? (Don't get me
> wrong a properly abstracted configuration mechanism would be great - but if
> I can configure it at all that's good enough for me)
> 
> The main issue with a basic config file strategy that I can see is that it
> should be a requirement to have multiple engines in a cluster running of the
> same configuration file. Weblogic does this with basic configuration files
> (it has one server which provides config information to the rest I think).
> 
The best way to go, IMVHO, is to solve the configuration design on the
first version. Since configurations are the key important factor for the
whole tomcat design (every single piece of what we're building relies on
configurations!), I think that we better figure out a complete abstract
way of configuring tomcat, and, for the first implementation, providing
just the basis of it (like reading an XML file and that's it).
But, when then we'll need to face other scenarios, like deriving
configuration from whatever source, we'll just need to write our
adapters from (for example) LDAP, from HTTP from all the diferent
sources, without having to think (or care) about modifying our
components...

If we rely on a tree structure, something like XML, i mean, we could
just imagine to have today something like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <webserver>
    <listen port="80"/>
    <listen port="8080"/>
    <virtualhost name="xxxxx">
      ...
    </virtualhost>
    ...
  </webserver>
  ...
</configuration>

then we could evolve to something like 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <webserver>
    <?import source="ldap" server="...."?>
  </webserver>
  ...
</configuration>

and derive our resulting tree for webserver from a LDAP service...
Or something like it...

(Hope it's clear!)

	Pier