On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Andy Schwartz
<andy.schwartz@oracle.com> wrote:
Okay, thanks for the update Ed. I wasn't aware that there had been push back from the Servlet EG on this.
Personally I don't understand the nature of the objection. In some case fine-grained (application-specific) control is desired. We have addressed this case via the context parameter. There seems to be general agreement in our EG that a system-level property would also be beneficial and in particular would improve the ease of use of this feature for development-time scenarios (ie. no need for a web.xml or JNDI config). Not sure why we need to choose one approach vs. the other. Both serve a purpose.
The system property seems like a very reasonable option to me. It matches well with "starting the server in debug mode" and I could even see the two being tied together in an IDE server control (tangential to this decision, of course). Just like with debug mode, this should be something that can be controlled without a change to application code.
We need to make sure we are clear whether the context parameter overrides the system property, or vice versa. I would think the system property would take precedence, but I'm open to counter arguments.
-Dan