users@glassfish.java.net

Re: Glassfish V3 Planning 2.0 -- The Web Tier

From: <glassfish_at_javadesktop.org>
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:38:52 PST

Yes, this sounds close enough.

The key is, I think, a discrepancy between the original roles portrayed in the the EJB spec, and simply the realities or how EJB is used today.

Originally, we had the "Developer" and "Deployer" roles. But in truth, you pretty much have to be a Deployer to be a Developer, and, while it's not absolutely necessary, you almost need to be a Developer to be a Deployer.

Exposing that kind of configuration through the console makes the role of the Deployer, perhaps, a bit more lightweight than as envisioned by the spec. In the spec, in theory, the Deployer was in charge of all the XML files and what not. HA! Yea, good luck with that. But today, especially with the annotations, the Deployer is more the guy who shoves the EAR at the server, they're not tweaking the contents at all because it's an opaque blob.

Now, as a comment to the issue on the wiki, I DO think that whatever is done by the annotations should be exposed AND changeable, just like any other deployment descriptor. One of the nice things of JEE5 is that we have these annotations to make the 80% case that much easier. But, the annotations are simply suggestions that are supposed to be overridden by the XML files. So, if we can override it, then the console should expose those annotation details to let us get our mitts on them. Maybe in an 'advanced' view since, again, 80% of the time, folks won't care.

As an aside, I always thought it would be interesting for a tool to create a deployment descriptor for an annotated bean so that users could see the parameters and their defaults etc. that are implied by their absence. Many people don't dig deep in to the documentation, merely using the artifacts available to them, and seeing everything that "@SessionBean" implies would be enlightening to many I think.
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