Re: [Jetty-support] Arbitrary types for <env-entry>

[Eric R. <eri...@gm...>]

On 11/7/06, Jan Bartel <ja...@mo...> wrote:
> Eric,
>
> I'm having difficulty remembering jetty5.x, but as far as I recall, I
> added a feature whereby you can define the equivalent of <env-entry>s
> in the jetty config file, and the values can be any arbitrary Object.

That's a nice feature, but I prefer to stay clear of Jetty-specific
features as much as possible since my product may be deployed on
Tomcat (or whatever) by third parties.


> By the way, the Servlet Specification mandates that <env-entry>s
> in web.xml are only of the core Java types, which is why the
> jetty config file way of specifying them lets you get around that.

I searched the Servlet 2.4 spec for "env-entry-type" and found that
the DTD indicates in comments that only the certain core types are
allowed values for <env-entry-type>. I guess a DTD comment in the spec
can be seen as a formal specification, although that seems debatable.
In any case, I'll just live with it because I doubt little ol' me
could convince you guys that it would be within spec to support other
types.
Well, actually....It is interesting to note that Jetty appears to
support a variety of string values for <env-entry-type> that are not
explicitly listed in that DTD; so it could be argued that Jetty is
more lenient than the spec allows. That argument could be reasonably
extended to justify moving the "enhanced" env-entry feature into the
web.xml support instead of a proprietary Jetty-specific configuration.

Care to discuss that further? If not, I will drop it...

Thanks,
Eric