Minimal or Modular it's up to you

[Henri Gomez]

There was many noise these days about making another
release of tomcat (the minimal one covering only JSR154),
and another proposal to make a modular Tomcat.

It may be because my mother language is french, but I
still didn't understand why Tomcat commiters didn't
find an arrangement on these 2 proposals which GOES
in the same direction.

What Jon and Pier want is a minimal distribution of
Tomcat 5.

What Costin proposed is to make Tomcat 5 more modular,
which is very similar to what make Apache HTTP server
so successfull.

Why didn't merge the both proposal ?

- Make a Tomcat distribution which is composed of :

- a minimal tomcat core
- extension modules.

People will be free to install the core, and the modules
they want to use (JMX/JASPER/JNDI/JK2).

Java is not so bad in introspection and class discovery
and should be able to detect what is present and what
could be activated.

To mimic the HTTPD way, the server.xml could have entries
likes these :


<IfModule JMX>

<Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener"
debug="0"/>
<Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener"
debug="0"/>

</IfModule>



<IfModule JK2>

<Connector className="org.apache.coyote.tomcat4.CoyoteConnector"
port="8009" minProcessors="5" maxProcessors="75"
enableLookups="true" redirectPort="8443"
acceptCount="10" debug="0" connectionTimeout="20000"
useURIValidationHack="false"

protocolHandlerClassName="org.apache.jk.server.JkCoyoteHandler"/>

</IfModule>



The goal will be :

- make happy people who need a minimal distribution, for example
those who want to embed it on low memory device.

- make happy people who want to get the full artillery to play
and experiment with.

- and in fine attract 'modules' writers, à la HTTPD way, developpers
which make Apache 1.x/2.x servers so widely used today.


And of course, restore the consensus which was present till the TC 5.0
project was initiated by the commiters who previously spent many times
developping each one THEIR OWN vision of servlet container (3.3/4.0).

But we're in a real world and since commiters are after all humans, I
politely recommand to people who do NOT REALLY WANT TO BE CONSTRUCTIVE and may restart a new Tomcat War, to try to convince others teams
making others servlet implementation.




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