[Building Sakai] Sakai directory layout for Tomcat 7

[Steve Swinsburg]

I can confirm that taking everything from the separate classloader directories and dumping them all into /lib works - I tried it a while ago.

The issue is that the assemblies are all setup to deploy to shared/lib so jars still end up there.

So for us to use the native TC7 layout, all assemblies need to change, but that isn't a big job. The support is already there in the Sakai maven plugin, it just needs to be activated with a profile, eventually made the default.

There was talk at the TCC meeting in Atlanta about using a different directory for Sakai to make things easier for developers, (ie /sakai/lib or something) and have everything deploy into there, since you can no longer just blow away /lib like you could for /shared/lib, there is vital Tomcat stuff in the lib directory. I am less of a fan of that since we would still need catalina.properties to be adjusted which is what we are trying to avoid. There was also talk of adding an undeploy' goal like we had in Maven 1. That would be ideal for cleaning out Tomcat, though I'm not sure how it would handle the binary overlays...

cheers,
Steve


On 18/07/2012, at 1:42 AM, Matthew Jones wrote:

> We had discussed it, and I think the question was more about whether or not it would work for webdav than anything, and getting someone to invest (likely significant time) to test webdav. This was a big piece that was broken in Tomcat 7 to begin with, and required a split deployment and a lot of effort to maintain as it is. (Because it requires different libraries for Tomcat 5.5 verses Tomcat 7)
> 
> Currently Sakai deploys some library files to: server/lib, common/lib and shared/lib. The ones outside shared/lib are
> dav-common, dav-server and kernel-common. The dav files actually have classes in them, the kernel-common only has the log4j.properties file.
> 
> Back in tomcat 5.5, these files when placed in each of these class loaders all had a special parent->child hierarchy. ( http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/class-loader-howto.html ) . In Tomcat 6, this was made to no longer be the default (everything in /lib defined as the shared.loader) but still easy to change by modifying 3 lines in a configuration file (as you mentioned). 
> 
> I haven't heard of anyone that treid taking all the files that were deployed to all 3 locations, putting them into the shared loader and seeing if everything works. It's quite possible these files are still needed *in* the common or server class-loaders, so having one directory may never work.
> 
> Anyone is free to try it out though. I wouldn't consider changing the deployment location for a few tools as big of a problem as thoroughly testing webdav. (Even if the criteria was that it just passed litmus)
> 
> I suppose it could be nice, but ideally I think most people are going to want to opt to modify this catalina.properties anyway to setup a split catalina.home/catalina.base configuration for production, and for those that use the demo it's already done.
> 
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Wolfgang Rohregger <Wolfgang.Rohregger at mci.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  
> 
> will there be an adaption of the sakai deployment plugin and the overlay packages for the new Tomcat 7 layout?
> 
> I know that there exists a way to configure Tomcat to use the old directory structure but maybe it would be cleaner to do it Tomcat 7 style.
> 
>  
> 
> I’ve had a look at the deployment stuff and it seems to me that there are at least three components that would have to be changed for this:
> 
>  
> 
> entitybroker-assembly
> 
> kernel-assembly
> 
> sakai-plugin
> 
>  
> 
> What is your opinion on this?
> 
>  
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>  
> 
> Wolfgang
> 
> 
> 
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