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Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 09:38:44 -0600
From: "Jeff Tulley" <JTULLEY@novell.com>
To: <tomcat-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: Re: [Patch] Form based login possibility with
	HTMLManagerServlet
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>The whole idea of having an HTML interface to Manager, in the same
webapp,
>seems like a really poor choice.  The only reason that this webapp
exists,
>and the fundamental principle behind all of its external interface
design
>decisions, was to make it easy for client applications to talk to
(such as
>the Ant tasks that are already included).

>IMHO, anything done to enhance the browser-based user experience of
this
>app is really misdirected energy.  If you want a nice human user
interface
>that offers this kind of functionality, you should do one of the
>following:

>* Factor it out into a separate webapp designed to be used
>  by humans, not machines (appropriate to Tomcat 4.1.x).

Thinking about this last night, I came to the same conclusion, but for
even more practical reasons.
If they are two separate web applications, then they can have different
authentication types.  The BASIC is as you say, well suited for machine
access(except for the ASCII 8-bit password limitation), whereas there
are a lot of drawbacks once you do BASIC with an HTML interface.

The thing is, I don't think we want yet another web application.  It
really seems like the best thing to do is to take the lifecycle
management functionality and put it into the admin web application.  

The reason we use the manager HTML interface is so we can see the
current running(or dead) state of all of the contexts, and sometimes to
turn them off and on (though less often).  The admin web application
does not have this, would it be hard to add it there?

The reasons to keep them the same is reuse of code and simplicity.  I
guess they could be refactored to use the same class anyway.  Still, I'd
be against making three management applications, on HTTP/command driven,
one HTML to do the same commands, and /admin.  


>* Use a JMX-based client instead of an HTML-based client
>  (appropriate for Tomcat 5.0.x).

Yeah, this is the ultimate answer, still within the admin application,
I'd think.


Jeff Tulley  (jtulley@novell.com)
(801)861-5322
Novell, Inc., The Leading Provider of Net Business Solutions
http://www.novell.com

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