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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hi Alexander and all others,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I first started to look at OpenCms about 1.5 years
ago for using with an application running on a Jboss server but OpenCms,
although nice in many ways, did not cooperate that well with Jboss. I was
looking into making it behave more in the J2EE way but run out
of time.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I've kept an eye on the development since then,
testing the alphas as they were released and now I have a new project where I'm
interested to use OpenCms for the frontend. Again the application is running on
Jboss so I started to look into how to integrate OpenCms.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I discovered the following problems:</FONT></DIV>
<UL>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>OpenCms "hijack" System.out and System.err while
the setup wizard run to capture the output when importing workplace. That is
not acceptable since it steal all console output from Jboss. I have worked it
through so that instead of redirecting System.out and System.err to a pipe, a
PrintWriter directed to the pipe is passed along to all neccesary
objects.</FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>When OpenCms was set up, all logging stoped
working including the console. That turned out to be due to the log4j
configuration in opencms.properties, if used it overide log4j configuration of
Jboss. It was quite easy to solve, just set <FONT
size=2>log.log4j.configuration property to empty and OpenCms will not set it's
own logging configuration. Instead setup logging in Jboss log4j.xml. I also
added a property log.prefix to be able to separate logging from two different
OpenCms instances running in the same app server.</FONT></FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>Jboss unpacks deployed packages such as war files
to a temporary directory and run them from there. It gives them a name like
tmp34324opencms-exp.war. I added some code to CmsSystemInfo.init to extract
the correct name of the webapp (in this case opencms). I can't figure out
exactly how the context path work though to deploy to root context, I thought
setting WebApplicationContext would do the trick but then all links are
generated without the host part. I temporary solved it by setting
DefaultWebApplication to the same as the webapp name. I need support for this
since I need to deploy as part of an ear so that I can use separate class
loaders for each ear file. Otherwise deploying two applications using OpenCms
would crash if they don't use the exact same class files.</FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>Since Jboss unpack the war file to a temporary
directory, it cause a problem for OpenCms since it changes e.g. it's
configuration files when the setup wizard run, index files etc. The solution
was to add a context parameter to web.xml called DataDir which control where
OpenCms keep it's data. If not set it will be WEB-INF as before but I set it
to ${jboss.server.data.dir}/opencms to get all data files under
${jboss.dir}/server/default/data (if I run with the default configuration). I
can then easily have different instances of OpenCms use different data dirs.
The other alternative would be to put all settings into the db but that would
be a lot more work. The data dir is copied from the default values under
WEB-INF at startup.</FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>A minor bug occured in the workplace, I don't know
what the reason is to read it's resources from an export dir instead from vfs
like everything else but I made it very simple and added a ckeck if the export
dir exsist, if not the resources are loaded from vfs.</FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>Another minor bug was some classes that were
stored in the session were not Serializable, causing tomcat to throw an ugly
stacktrace when shutting down and starting because it tries to store all
sessions to be able to restore them again. I added implements Serializable to
those classes I saw this happen on.</FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>Two new utility classes were created,
CmsDataDirUtil.java and PropertiesCmsStringMapper.java, which are used
when managing the data dir.</FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>In CmsConfigurationException the error message set
by throwing class was not included in the message returned by
getMessage().</FONT></LI></UL>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I think that covers all. All patches are attached
as well as the two new classes (goes into src/org/opencms/util/).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I've now been running with these changes for some
time and it works excellent. I am very satisfied. If these patches get accepted,
this are the next areas I'll look in to:</FONT></DIV>
<UL>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>Struts integration. Altough it is possible to use
OpenCms with Struts today it's a bit cumbersome. I want to be able when I use
the workplace to add a Struts action (not the class itself, that would have to
be deployed with the other jars), set up it's parameters and point it's
forwards to where I want them to point on this specific instance. That way the
power and flexibility of Struts can really shine in combination with OpenCms.
I think that the way to acomplish that would be to make a CmsStrutsLoader
class and some management glue. It would still be possible to use Struts as it
is used today.</FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>Integration with J2EE style authentication &
authorization. Neccesary to be able to call EJB's which use container managed
security. Can be a bit tricky but should be possible to do without breaking
backward compatibility.</FONT></LI>
<LI><FONT face=Arial size=2>Later make a vfs module which use Hibernate so
that it can make use of JbossCache and Jboss clustering
functions.</FONT></LI></UL>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Thats's all I have for now. Keep up the good
work.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Best regards</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Sverker</FONT></DIV>
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