On Thu, 17 May 2001, Casey Lucas wrote:
>
> I finally had some time last night to see why all of the watchdog tests
> wouldn't run correctly if tag pooling was turned on.
>
> Based on my understanding of the spec I think that that some of the code
> included in watchdog may be incorrect. The spec says that a tag handler
> can be used multiple times and that release() should be called before the
> tag handler gets garbage collected. But
> src\server\jsp-tests\WEB-INF\classes\jsp\tags\examples\TestTag.java relies
> on release() being called after every use of the tag.
>
It wouldn't surprise me if Watchdog made some incorrect assumptions
here. Tag lifecycle seems to confuse lots of people, and because Tomcat
didn't implement pooling there wasn't an easy way to catch errors.
If you've got diffs to fix the assumptions, I can evaluate them and check
them in. If it's more complicated than that, I'll forward the relevant
info to the folks that wrote the Watchdog tests for comment and action.
> The code shouldn't be hard to fix for all situations except the test of
> the release method itself. If pooling is in use, then release will
> only be called when the web context is unloaded or an exception is thrown
> during tag usage. We could modify the "release test" to throw an exception
> during tag usage and hence cause release to be called, but I'm not sure
> we should because the spec doesn't say anything about reuse of a tag handler
> when an exception is thrown. For example, I guess a container would be compliant
> if reused a tag (and hence didn't call release) even in the case of exceptions.
>
>
> So, my questions are:
>
> 1. Is the watchdog test I've described bad and need fixing?
>
> 2. If so, any comments on what to do with the "release test"?
>
>
>
> -casey
>
Craig
