admin@glassfish.java.net

Re: Preferences API

From: Ken Paulsen <Ken.Paulsen_at_Sun.COM>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:55:46 -0700

Hi Lloyd,

Thanks for the response, see my comments below.


Lloyd Chambers wrote:
> Ken,
>
> First, what kind of preferences are being stored?
For our use (#1 in my original email), I'm looking for a way to store
admin user preferences. this would include things like their favorite
common tasks, customized help notes on pages, or other preferences that
customize the admin console GUI.
> Is this for developer or production use?
For production.
> My initial thought is that the user running Glassfish is problematic.
> The user could be "root" or "_appserver" or "ken" or "lloyd". But the
> user using the GUI is "admin" or "admin1", etc. So shouldn't
> preferences be tied to the administrative user? It doesn't make sense
> to me to associate them with the system user running the server.
Yes, this is true. So the "scope" would be application scope and we
would either not store console-user specific data at all, or store it in
a way where our application logic does the security checking to ensure
information is not shared across users.

If #2 in my email was implemented, then it could respect Java EE
authenticated users (in addition to storing it in a location that is
specific to the container vs. ~/.java). This would solve that part of
the problem.

Ken
>
> Lloyd
>
> On Aug 15, 2008, at 10:23 AM, Ken Paulsen wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I wanted to float an idea and see what people think. Java provides a
>> "Preferences API"
>> (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/prefs/Preferences.html).
>> The default backing store for this api (on Linux anyway) stores the
>> preference data in XML files in "~/.java/.userPrefs/*". This means if
>> you use this API in GlassFish, the user running the GF process will
>> get files put in their ~/.java/.userPrefs directory. If you move the
>> application server or switch users which run GF, this preference data
>> will be lost (unless you migrate the preference data also).
>>
>> I have 2 things I'd like feedback on:
>>
>> 1) Would it be acceptable for the GF Admin Console web application to
>> use this API to store preferences knowing that it has the above
>> limitations?
>>
>> 2) What do you think about adding a Java EE backing store that
>> behaved more appropriately in a Java EE environment? This might be a
>> nice developer-oriented feature to support in Java EE (or perhaps as
>> a GlassFish value-add).
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Ken
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: admin-unsubscribe_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
>> For additional commands, e-mail: admin-help_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
>>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: admin-unsubscribe_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
> For additional commands, e-mail: admin-help_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
>