[Jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss/Tomcat Integration] - Re: Work on JBCACHE-13: Standalone Tomcat http session repli

[bstansberry <nu...@jb...>]

anonymous wrote : I would view this a new macro that launches a tomcat dist vs the current jboss dist which is what the testsuite/imports/server-config.xml start-jboss macro does. 

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking.

anonymous wrote : #1 The issue is how to integrate the standalone footprint into the testsuite. This could conditionally done based on a catalina.home property that would point to an external dist. 

Using an external dist is definitely more straightforward than trying to create one in the testsuite.  As you said, the issue is getting the required JBoss jars on the server classpath.  The following jars need to be in $CATALINA_HOME/server/lib; getting them there is certainly simple enough if we don't mind copying them into the external dist.

tomcat55-service.jar (or a stripped down version thereof)
jboss-cache.jar
jgroups.jar
jboss.jar
jboss-j2ee.jar
jboss-system.jar
jboss-jmx.jar
jboss-common.jar
concurrent.jar
log4j.jar

There would need to be two catalina.base directory structures to hold the server.xml files, logs, temp and work dirs for the two instances.  Two distinct server.xml's would be needed, configured to use different ports, as I don't believe tomcat supports an analogue to the jboss.bind.addr feature.

anonymous wrote : Since we have to install jboss specific jars or at least make them available to the tomcat instance classpath, one could also argue that this is really no different than then existing tomcat-ssl-tests, tomcat-sso-clustered-tests, etc. where a minimal jboss mc is used to host the tomcat instance.

A concern I have about using a minimal jboss mc as the test platform is that we need to be sure that webapps are deployed using the standalone tomcat deployment code, not TomcatDeployer.  Making sure the deployment works right is really the main thing to test.  Once an app is deployed, the actual mechanics of session replication are exactly the same in standalone mode vs. embedded.  (There are classloader hierarchy differences that make standalone replication a different use case that needs to be tested, but the code being executed is the same).

anonymous wrote : Which approach to use is a function of where we want people to download tomcat and follow a recipe to add jboss clustering, or whether a customized tomcat install/installer is used. 

I'd been thinking in terms of a recipe approach, as it is fairly simple and allows users to easily integrate jboss clustering into different Tomcat revs.  (The dependencies of jboss clustering on TC code is very minimal, so the integration is unlikely to break from rev to rev).  A rough outline of a distribution zip might be as follows.

doc
--- .... various docs
dist
--- conf
------ server-cache.xml
------ cluster-cache.xml
--- server
------ lib
--------- .... the libs listed above
src
--- main
------ ... relevant source from the jboss-tomcat module
build.xml

The recipe would be to:
1) Copy the contents of the dist folder to your Tomcat distribution.
2) Either rename server-cache.xml to server.xml, or cut and paste the relevant pieces to your existing server.xml
3) Edit cluster-cache.xml if you want to change the TreeCache config.
4) If you want to override the default replication granularity or trigger for a particular webapp, add a  element to its context.xml.

If we want to distribute source, I wouldn't distribute all the source from the tomcat module; only the portions relevant to JBossCache based session and sso replication.  The other classes in the module introduce compile-time dependencies on the cluster, connector and security modules.

Ben and I discussed not including JBossCache and its dependencies in a session replication distribution and having them integrate the current JBossCache distribution.  Ben, since we talked I've realized that JBossCache distributes the jboss-minimal.jar while the session repl code needs the full jboss.jar.  Given this difference, I think having users integrate would be pretty tough.

Sorry if this is wordy :)

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