PROPOSAL: use JSR-88 for plugin management

Openfire Openfire Dev
1

After trying, unsuccessfully, to wrestle DWR (an ajax/java utility) into a plugin, I decided to take a step back and see if there is a more fruitful way of managing plugin deployment.

I remember reading about JSR-88 in the J2EE 1.4 spec and wondered if it made sense this caset. Essentially, JSR-88 is an api that allows container artifacts (like wars, ears, jars and rars) to be deployed systematically. If our plugins are essentially war files, then maybe it’'d be worth investigating using the containers built in mechanism for deploying the application? This might make apps like DWR, with their funky use of classloaders, work.

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/CARGO/Home is an api that leverages this api in a high level. Might be worth investigating.

What do you think?

Noah

2

Noah,

I’‘ll have to take a closer look at Cargo when I have a sec. However, there is one plugin trick that you might still try. One thing we’'ve done before is simply get a handle on the Jetty instance and add the plugin directory as a normal web-app. It actually works fairly well although it feels like a total hack.

-Matt

3

I was looking at that, but I feel the same way…it’'s a total hack. Especially when there is another thread posted this week talking about using a different web server (tomcat). Then the plugin is not portable

Noah