[Ginp-developers] Architectural Questions

[Brian B. <br...@Pi...>]

Doug, I wonder whether you can help my understanding of the ginp webapp 
by correcting any mis-apprehensions I might have?


1. ginp.xml defines the photo directory list to an instance of the webapp.

2. All users browsing the same webapp (context) navigate the same set of 
photos because they all "share" the same ginp.xml.

3. No matter what you tell the configuration wizard about your existing 
or new ginp.xml, the file that is actually used to find and show 
pictures MUST exist as /ginp/WEB-INF/ginp.xml.

4. ginp.xml can point to more than one "Collection" of photos, each is 
found in the local filesystem (but normally outside the webapp directory).

5. The Collection logic assumes you will have a 3-deep file hierarchy, 
e.g. 
/path-to-some-directory/individual-photo-directory/one-or-more-jpegs. 
You need to represent your "complete collection" of photos (however it 
might really be organised) as a set of 3-level Collection objects within 
ginp.xml.

6. The ginp.xml file is read during each webapp startup - it is NOT 
currently cached as some kind of persistent object that survives a 
tomcat restart or deployment of a new war file.

7. Does the security stuff work? i.e. shouldn't a Collection defined 
with users and/or administrators only be viewed after a logon has been 
forced? (This doesn't seem to work on my system, so I currently add 
security constraints to ginp's web.xml to make tomcat enforce my access 
rules.)

8. The setup application (only?) uses Hivemind and Hibernate to create 
an external  persistent representation of ginp.xml as a java object. 
Does it work? Is the persistent object ever used outside the 
configuration wizard? How does this all relate to the use and 
maintenance of the "real" ginp.xml file?

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One of my reasons for suggesting that we refactor the setup logic into a 
maven sub-project was to help clarify these issues for anyone looking at 
the code for the first time.

I really don't know how much of what we have now is mainline logic, how 
much is work-in-progress, and how much is abandoned experimentation.