Re: [gatein-dev] Auto-import

Hi Thomas, every body always wonder about auto import feature, so I guess it's your turn to wonder :-) Application registry is a business view of the applications, where applications such as portlet and gadget are provisioned. Application registry is originally populated from an XML deployment descriptor in a file configuration, so there is already a mechanism to populate it. The auto import feature is a development feature that is designed to help application developer to see his portlets in the composer when editing a layout. So I'm not sure if we want to keep or remove the auto import feature, but what I am certain is that we do not want to have *all* applications imported on every startup as it would be contradictory with the concept of of having an application registry where things are provisioned. For instance there are certain portlets that you don't want to see in the application registry when gatein is used in a non development mode. So we could remove the auto import feature in the future but not for an auto import mechanism that would auto import any portlets, it would need to be smarter and take in account development mode and production mode. At some point I thought about having a specific deployment descriptor (similar to portlet-instances.xml in JBoss Portal) that would be used to provision portlet instances. It's an idea that we should think about for a later revision of GateIn. But still it would be interesting to keep an "import" feature but instead of scoping it at the global level, it would be scoped at a finer granularity such as the web application level (that would import portlets from a specified portlet application that do not have an XML instance deployment descriptor inside). Another reason is that application registry is also about Gadgets, and today there is no way to detect the life cycle of a gadget so at some point the gadgets must be "imported" wether it's done by at boot time by the configuration mentionned above or by the auto import. On Dec 2, 2009, at 1:36 PM, Thomas Heute wrote: