Re: [Webmacro-devel] Template based config - a benefit

[Marc P. <ma...@an...>]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2003 23:30:58 -0700, Lane Sharman <la...@op...> 
wrote:

>
>
> Keats wrote:
>
>>
>> Obviously this would take some discussion -- I don't know if we could do 
>> this for 2.0, but maybe 2.5?
>>
> I am eager to close out 2.0 and leave for 2.5 template-centric 
> configuration.
>
> btw: I personally do a lot of app configuration with WM and believe there 
> is a special role for it but I am not sure we are there yet. For example, 
> I want some scheme which does not penalize every template with a global 
> include blob. Don't believe we have designed a pathing or loading scheme 
> for this yet.

Actually I was envisaging a specific configuration template name used by 
WM, set in WebMacro.defaults (yes we'd need to keep some of that).

i.e. like Apache's http.conf (which can include other files) we'd have 
someting like a WebMacro.config template which is scanned by default, when 
the Broker inits.

It would not require explicit or implicit #include into every template.

We'd bootstrap this WebMacro.config with only the directive(s) required to 
do config - i.e. nothing but something like #declare or #config, and maybe 
#set. The config template calls those to set up the Broker, and we could 
make it so that everything it declares is immediately available to the 
config template - so that it could do things like #foreach for complex 
automated config... but I'm not sure about this.

Actually though I think before we should consider how to do template-based 
config, we should look at and agree on a scheme for abstracting config 
completely - i.e. make it so you can add (but maybe not remove) directives 
and providers to Broker programmatically using any scheme you like. A bit 
like what we are doing for ContextTool now.

This would give the app complete control over config - i.e. using a 
WM20LegacyPropertiesFileConfigLoader, a WM25TemplateConfigLoader, or a 
MyApplicationCustomConfigLoader.

But I suggest we don't get too far into this now! How about we create a 
NextNextRelease page on wiki ;-)

-- 
Marc Palmer
Contract Java Consultant/Developer
			
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