Scott Stark wrote:
The deployment DSL should have a more admin oriented DSL. Ideally the project provides this and there is a mapping via a ManagedComponent from the admin DSL onto the deployment DSL metadata. I'm not sure how much simpler the integration of the admin configuration vs deployment features can be. Is there something you have in mind?
Sorry for the late reply.
I think that when you talk about mapping the admin DSL to deployment metadata, you're reaching into implementation details. It's very conceivable than in a reasonable alternate implementation, deployments like the threads deployment wouldn't even have any metadata. It would be much more efficient to directly read XML and spit out BeanMetaData objects, for example. The only reason we have metadata at all for threads, logging, I/O, etc. is because we're constrained to use JBossXB for this - it would be a serious mistake to think of this as a requirement. The whole concept of having deployment metadata of any sort might sound like a design philosophy or paradigm, but it's really just a coincidence of implementation.
The real paradigm which is actually in use today basically amounts to a DSL which is not some kind of serialized representation of the running state of the system; it is an imperitive command language which describes a series of services which are to be started. However everything that has been described under the heading of domain.xml is descriptive of additional configuration which is applied atop a running system. The two models are basically orthogonal, and we should not be trying to solve both with one uniform solution - you're going to end up with either a stunted deployment DSL or an overly complex administration DSL.
I think it's important to think about this from the perspective that the deployment and admin DSLs are two different user interfaces for two different purposes and stop thinking about implementation details until the expected semantics are clear, which, judging from this and other threads, is still a bit of a question mark.