Re: TC3.3 Proposal: Refactoring org.apache.jasper.servlet

[Craig R. McClanahan]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Mel Martinez wrote:

> 
> The glass is half-full as well - because at least with
> the servlet api it is _possible_ to implement those
> services portably and thus provide a portable JSP
> compiler.
> 

When Tomcat 4.0 was created, one of the goals was to eliminate all the
Jasper dependencies on servlet container code (with the goal of a portable
JSP environment).  We were completely successful except for two
(initially) and now only one issue:  specifying a classpath for the Java
compiler.

In a JDK 1.1 environment, there is no portable solution to this
problem.  In JDK 1.2 or later, you can have a portable solution as long as
the web app classloader is a subclass of URLClassLoader (as it is in
Tomcat 4.0), because you can ask the URLClassLoader what it's repositories
are and therefore reconstruct a reasonable class path in most
circumstances.

The portability goal is definitely achievable in a Java2 world.

Craig