I posted to the dev list earlier about needing a small, relatively lightweight version of Catalina to embed into another program. I spent the weekend putting together something that more of less fits my needs. (My needs include a relatively small jar, plus no use of the local file system) I ended up with a 260k jarfile of the catalina classes, plus another 75k or so of new Container classes. I suspect there's at least another 100k that can be trimmed.
I ran into a troubling amount of coupling between the various bits of Catalina. The o.a.catalina.* classes were fairly clean, but the implementation classes tended to know a lot about each other. That made reuse difficult, since inheriting from one of the core classes ended up bringing in pretty much every class (and external dependency) in Catalina. The implementation classes obviously need to know something about each other, but there are an awful lot of hardcoded assumptions. The large number of casts makes it very hard to figure out what depends on what. Instead of trying to make the core classes more generic, I ended up writing a new set of Containers and support classes. Using the existing Catalina code made that fairly easy, but much of the code re-use was necessarily of the cut-and-paste variety. There were a couple of especially inconvenient couplings that are probably worth fixing, one trivial and one a little more serious. I've submitted both of these as bugs. First, there's an uneeded import of org.xml.sax.AttributeList in o.a.c.realm.RealmBase. That one's not such a big deal since it doesn't matter at run time. The first of the attached patches removes it. Second, there's a cast to StandardContext in AuthenticatorBase. The cast is needed because AuthenticatorBase wants to use the same debug level as its associated Context, but Container doesn't expose the any set/getDebug methods. It would be good to get rid of the cast because it's the only place that BasicAuthenticator makes assumptions about the exact type of its Context. The second patch just gets rid of the StandardContext import and cast. A better solution might be to move set/getDebug up into Container. Adding a Debug interface would work too, but that seems like overkill. The MinimalTomcat code is definitely alpha quality, and it's only meant to support the particular subset of Catalina that I happen to need right at the moment. It is not, and is not intended to be, a complete reimplementation of the Catalina core classes. On the other hand, it's substantially smaller and less complicated, while retaining the same basic architecture. If anyone's interested, feel free to email me at the address below, or respond on the list. -- Christopher St. John [EMAIL PROTECTED] DistribuTopia http://www.distributopia.com
AuthBaseCast.patch
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RealmBaseImport.patch
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