Re: [Webware-discuss] Answer to a few problems?

[Chuck E. <ec...@mi...>]

At 08:25 PM 8/21/00 -0400, Jay Love wrote:
>Perhaps a cleaner approach would be to define a directory hierarchy that
>would be assumed.  So you would have the root directory of your
>Context/Application(I'm still stuck on that term), and beneath it, you
>might have at least three directories, Config (any config files),
>Classes (Session, Application/Context, etc), Content or Servlets
>(obvious).  More elaborate sites might have a Cans directory, a Static
>directory, etc.

Sounds reasonably good.


>Then what's the difference from running multiple AppServers?  That's
>essentially what you're saying here.  The only difference being you only
>have one directory for WebKit.  In that case, we could just modify
>AppServer to take a command line telling it which set of configuration
>files to use.

It's not all that different, as you pointed out. But it would work out of 
the box and it would launch the application if needed.


>I was intending to extend the Context concept to something like this.
>But Chuck and I have always differed on where to split the line between
>AppServer, Application and Context.  (Well, I don't know that we differ
>that much, we've just never reconciled our terminology ;) ) If you're
>going to run on Multiple ports, I think you're splitting too high.

Not sure what you mean by splitting two high.


As a review, I'm thinking the future looks like this:

* Each app is it's own process
* Therefore, no two apps have the same process space or port number
* Apps can switch host:ports without warning (as a result of fault detection)
* Apps can have multiple host:ports (for fault tolerance and load balancing)
* Adapters should launch apps if needed
* Adapters should all inherit the abstract Adapter class
* AppServer remains and continues to play the role of network and 
multitasking management
* It's very easy to override the Application, Session, etc. classes through 
either a config file or naming conventions.
* We adopt some kind of directory structure (or lack thereof) and advertise it
* Contexts are subsumed by this new structure
* Everyone is happy.


:-)