Hi,
I'd like to collect further feedback on the "compatibility"
property that was added in v3. We had some previous discussions on this,
here is a quick summary to help people refresh their memory:
1. The EE 5 spec started to define the packaging of the bundled
libraries of a Java EE application. The bundled libraries should be
placed in the library directory of the application (the directory could
be defined through application.xml and its default is lib).
2. In v2 we continued supporting the cases where the libraries are
placed at the application root in addition to the EE spec defined
packaging.
3. In EE 6 spec, it further clarified the visibility of the classes.
3. In v3, we decided to clean this part up and only support the spec
defined packaging (we were thinking if we don't do this clean up now, we
probably will never be able to do it).
4. We introduced the compatibility property to support v2 backward
compatibility (when the property is set, we have the same jar visibility
as in v2).
Since this part was implemented, a few cases were reported that an
application which used to run ok in v2 now stopped working in v3. So we
told them about the property and they went away. :-)
Now, for the latest reported case, the reporter raised a good point
that you cannot really pass in a property for the autodeploy (which is
also true for JSR88 case). So we need to be able to define this property
in domain.xml as a global setting and/or define this property in
sun-application.xml as a local setting. And furthermore the reporter
suggested the default behavior should be "v2 compatible" and the
property should be used for "spec defined way" (of course no one will
ever use this property now!). He mentioned the earlier versions of the
NetBeans (<6.8) packages the application in the spec incompatible way so
we might see quite a few cases of v2 app not working in v3.
This is the relevant glassfish issue and the reporter's blog:
https://glassfish.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=10496
http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/is_glassfish_v3_ready_for#comment-1256745799671
What are people's thoughts on this? Should we go back to the old v2
behavior by default? Or as we already provided a path for user to deploy
the app in a v2 compatible way, we should just leave it like that (with
additional changes to provide a way to specify this property for
autodeploy/JSR88 path)?
Thanks,
- Hong