On 16.06.2011, at 23:18, Bill Shannon wrote:
> Adam Bien wrote on 06/14/2011 10:15 PM:
>>
>> On 14.06.2011, at 22:45, Bill Shannon wrote:
>>
>>> Adam Bien wrote on 06/14/11 12:13 PM:
>>>>
>>>> On 13.06.2011, at 22:48, Bill Shannon wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> We discussed this "staging" concept quite a bit internally for EE 6.
>>>>> In the end we left it out of the platform because it didn't seem to
>>>>> solve any problem that couldn't already be solved using other existing
>>>>> mechanisms, at least as it was being proposed at the time.
>>>>>
>>>>> We found *very* few cases where the behavior of existing APIs would
>>>>> change based on what "stage" you were in. About the best we came up
>>>>> with was that some web application errors might want to produce more
>>>>> useful output when in development stage. But since we specify very
>>>>> little about what such output should contain, products already have
>>>>> the flexibility to vary their behavior in this regard.
>>>>>
>>>>> If the behavior of the platform APIs don't change based on the stage,
>>>>> what is it used for? Well, applications could change their behavior
>>>>> based on the stage, but they can already do that using an appropriate
>>>>> JNDI environment variable of their own choosing; we didn't really need
>>>>> to specify that.
>>>>
>>>> But then you will have to change the application code. With stage dependent application server settings you
>>>> would modify the application server settings, without touching the application.
>>>
>>> Well, you have to change the application code to read the variable and
>>> make use of it, but once you do that you can set different values of
>>> the variable without changing the application.
>>
>> I meant: you do not have to change the application to move it from one stage to another.
>
> So then we agree that using JNDI environment variables to hold the stage
> means you do not have to change the application to move from one stage
> to another, right?
Except that JNDI is ugly for that :-). Injecting a Stage class and asking it about the current stage (it could come from JNDI) would be more appealing.