[Flock-devel] Feature Requests: Use a flock.properties config file instead of system properties

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I'm with a hosting company that offers Java hosting (on Tomcat). In our
normal configuration, we run a shared Tomcat instance per server (shared
JVM). This is perfectly acceptable to many customers nowadays, and lets us
offer a more affordable Java hosting service.

A common problem with open-source Java products is the tendency to assume
everybody's on a private JVM, and so to rely on system properties for
application configuration. I think that goes against the purpose of "system"
(not webapp) properties anyway, and it causes a lot of problems in a
shared-JVM environment. This is a show-stopper with Flock, because the
default location of Flock's home directory is /username/.flock. This is
problematic because Tomcat runs under the same username for all users. It
seems the only way to set this parameter is through the flock.home system
property, which is also a problem, because this will again be shared by all
users. So I'm essentially limited to one installation of flock per server.

I can see reasons why you might want several Flock installations (in
different Webapps, for example), even on a dedicated JVM setup, so I think
it's too limiting to set this only by system property. I think you really
need to allow a flock.properties file that can be placed in WEB-INF/classes
for example, so that flock.home can be specified separately for each webapp.

Please let me know if this is a possibility, as I have a user who is eager
to run Flock in his account.

Gratefully,

Pete Cassetta
interAdvantage Administrator
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