[Jettylauncher-plugin] new committer: Olivier Jacquet, and general direction for development

[Eelco H. <eel...@gm...>]

Hi all,

It has been very quiet here, sorry for that. Geoff stepped down a two
years ago now, and I did about a year ago when Brian Wallace took
over. Unfortunately, that still didn't help keeping the project alive.
Which is a pity really, as there are quite a few users of it.

My involvement isn't going to be back any time soon, as Wicket still
gaining a lot of traction (and therefor needing attention) and I have
lots of indicators it will skyrocket by the end of this year. I also
don't really use JettyLauncher myself anymore, as since Jetty 6 it is
so easy to just write a class that does this, that I prefer that.

Anyway, the new comitter is Olivier Jacquet. Olivier, welcome! He came
to JettyLauncher through Tapestry. He states he'd like to get the next
version out of the door before Tapestry 5, which is in beta now,
arrives. I hope you'll be able to push this project forward once more
Olivier, and I'm sure you'll learn from it and have fun exploring :)

My thoughts on the direction of JettyLauncher are that if I would be
active for it, I would probably start over and work on something
really simple to use. Basically a starter with Jetty 6 packaged (so
you wouldn't have to have Jetty installed separately), a parameter for
the web app dir, one for the context dir (default value '/') and one
for the port (default value '8080').

Not only would this greatly simplify how the plugin is used, but it
also greatly simplifies the maintenance for the developers of the
plugin.

To illustrate how easy it is to start up Jetty with just java, in
Wicket's example project (http://wicketstuff.org/wicket13/,
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/wicket/branches/wicket-1.x/wicket-examples),
we do this to startup Jetty:

       public static void main(String[] args)
       {
               Server server = new Server();
               SelectChannelConnector connector = new SelectChannelConnector();
               connector.setPort(8080);
               server.setConnectors(new Connector[] { connector });

               WebAppContext web = new WebAppContext();
               web.setContextPath("/wicket-examples");
               web.setWar("src/main/webapp");
               server.addHandler(web);

               try
               {
                       server.start();
                       server.join();
               }
               catch (Exception e)
               {
                       e.printStackTrace();
                       System.exit(100);
               }
       }

That's all there is to it. Following this, and packaging Jetty so that
we don't have to deal with the ugly introspection etc we have to deal
with now, we make life a lot easier for all of us.

Regards,

Eelco