Kristoffer,
To be completely honest with you, we don't see a big customer demand for deployment-time/run-time administration of deployment descriptors (I know that's probably crazy talk in Java EE land with all of our Java EE roles :-)). In our design we have the capability to bind values from a property like this:${some.value}. The property could either come from a property file (pre-pended by the property file name if needed or get overridden by a system/environment property if needed). Admins could change those values if they like. From my consulting days though, I haven't seen many admins too eager to muck with application meta-data :-).
I do understand that increasing deployment descriptor flexibility could make administration tools development harder. It's just that I think it is the right trade-off to make. On the other hand, it wouldn't be so bad to have the run-time administration toolsjust look like XML property editors would it?
I am not sure about the configuration API part. Do we really need it since reading XML is so trivial? There really is no practical reason you could not use a CDI/EJB SPI to do any kind of run-time configuration change (proprietary or otherwise)? That's what we do for CDI right now anyway -- we parse/read the custom beans.xml and pass on the meta-data via the CDI portable extensions SPI to the CDI implementation (that's right now our own implementation).
Cheers,
Reza
On 6/14/2011 4:15 AM, Kristoffer Sjögren wrote:
> Hi
>
> Very interesting. Do you see a possibility for runtime administration of configuration using same meta model?
>
> Closed source products may not ship the build environment to customers as they treat xml descriptors as source code, sealing archives with a version, package signature before released to the package management system. This kind of product development would benefit from a programatic SPI that enable the system administrator to discover and override application configuration at runtime.
>
> Potentially resulting in more productive development release cycle with decreased turn-around times since no repackaging+deploy would be needed.
>
> Would Java EE Product Providers expose proprietary server configuration using same SPI possibly, enabling configuration management unification for server and application?
>
> I believe configuration is an important topic and would be more than willing to collaborate on this work.
>
> Cheers,
> -Kristoffer
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Reza Rahman [mailto:reza_rahman_at_lycos.com]
> Sent: den 10 juni 2011 19:51
> To: jsr342-experts_at_javaee-spec.java.net
> Subject: [jsr342-experts] Re: Configuration
>
>
> Antonio,
>
> Sorry for the late reply -- I have been out of town this week and in meetings. I'll contribute details as soon as I can...
>
> Your initial thoughts look about right. In our case, we allow the usage of EJB meta-data outside of EJB in CDI managed beans, also revamp the web.xml, application.xml, etc to be more compact/type-safe/flexible and allow for fragments/meta-data mixing for all XML. In short, we see it is an overhaul/modernization for Java EE XML configuration.
>
> The big problem in making our solution completely portable is the lack of a Servlet, EJB, etc, meta-data SPI (as Pete alluded to as an issue). It's also the case that Seam Config solves 80%-90% of the problems...
>
> Cheers,
> Reza
>
>
> On 6/10/2011 8:17 AM, Antonio Goncalves wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm not a configuration expert but, as a developer and deployer I feel something more is needed. I started to put some ideas into this email and then I switched to my blog. So here are my humble thoughts on the topic :
>
> http://agoncal.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/debate-and-what-about-configuration-in-java-ee-7/
>
> Reza and al, we can use this as a starting point to exchange an what configuration could look like
>
> Antonio
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 02:01, Reza Rahman<reza_rahman_at_lycos.com> wrote:
>
>
> Antonio,
>
> FYI, we do have some of these details hashed out internally. If it saves you time, I am happy to share those details.
>
> As I said, this has been on our radar, I'm just not entirely sure about priorities for Java EE 7 vs Java EE 8, etc.
>
> Cheers,
> Reza
>
>
>
> On 6/6/2011 6:01 PM, Linda DeMichiel wrote:
>
>
> Antonio,
>
> Sounds interesting, tell us more....
>
> thanks,
>
> -Linda
>
>
> On 6/2/2011 10:47 AM, Antonio Goncalves wrote:
>
>
> I would like to share some thoughts with you.
>
> I've used in the past Spring Config and latelly I've attended a conference that talked about Seam Config. Clearly I can
> see the benefit of having easy configuration on the entire platform. At the moment we have ejb-jar.xml and environment
> entries to configure our EJBs. We can also use the web.xml to pass some parameters to our servlets and bits and pieces
> in the application.xml file.
>
> Why not having a seperate spec that takes inspiration from Seam Config, Spring Config and so on to be able to configure
> the entire platform (a CDI bean as well as an EJB...). Configuration will also be used for Paas purposes of course.
>
> Configuration is an important topic and developers never know where to put it : property files, XML, database, JNDI. Why
> not having a spec that specifies how configuration should work (I really like the Seam Config approach) and each spec
> could then use it to specify how to configure a specific component, as well as batch processing or Paas/Saas
> configuration...
>
> Again, my 2 cents
>
> --
> Antonio Goncalves
> Software architect and Java Champion
>
> Web site<http://www.antoniogoncalves.org> | Twitter<http://twitter.com/agoncal> | Blog
> <http://feeds.feedburner.com/AntonioGoncalves> | LinkedIn<http://www.linkedin.com/in/agoncal> | Paris JUG
> <http://www.parisjug.org>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
> --
> Antonio Goncalves
> Software architect and Java Champion
>
> Web site<http://www.antoniogoncalves.org> | Twitter<http://twitter.com/agoncal> | Blog<http://feeds.feedburner.com/AntonioGoncalves> | LinkedIn<http://www.linkedin.com/in/agoncal> | Paris JUG<http://www.parisjug.org>
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