[gatein-dev] Issues with static resources

Hi, I think that it's not ideal how WebAppController processes static resources like images. I have 2 things to point out: 1) Today I found (and fixed) a bug that images are first processed by PortalRequestHandler, even if they should be processed by StaticResourceRequestHandler. Please look at https://issues.jboss.org/browse/GTNPORTAL-2338 for more details. This is really not good because HTTP header "Cache-Control: no-cache" is returned for every image, and so web browser needs to download images for each HTTP request to portal. I fixed it by adding StaticResourceRequestHandler before PortalRequestHandler into navController configuration, so it should not be the issue anymore. 2) Second thing is not so bad but a bit more tricky. The piece of code in WebAppController: {code} if (!started) { RequestLifeCycle.begin(ExoContainerContext.getCurrentContainer()); started = true; } ..... processed = handler.execute(new ControllerContext(this, router, req, res, parameters)); ..... if (started) { RequestLifeCycle.end(); } {code} This means that we need to start RequestLifeCycle for processing of every resource including static resource. And startup of some services is quite expensive (like startup of OrganizationService requires startup of Hibernate transaction). In other words, currently we are starting Hibernate transaction for processing images and other static resources. It's obvious that some handlers (PortalRequestHandler, LegacyRequestHandler and probably some others) really need to start RequestLifecycle, but some others like StaticResourceRequestHandler don't need it. So how about postponing the RequestLifecycle.begin from WebAppController to concrete handlers, which really need it? And use some ThreadLocal variable or flag "started" on ControllerContext, so that we can track if RequestLifeCycle.begin has been already started (can be useful to avoid double-start if some resource needs to be processed by more request handlers) ? Any other suggestions for this? Marek