Hi Andrea,
Good timing! We are currently in a meeting discussing a provisioning infrastructure for
WildFly. Expect to see some design proposals in this area on this list very soon. I think
your idea is potentially doable on top of what we are thinking of building.
-Jason
On May 25, 2016, at 12:04 PM, Andrea Battaglia
<abattagl(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I would like to bring to your attention a proposal for improving the the static modules
management in wildfly.
After a deep discussion with Sanne Grinovero about the static modules management in
wildfly and about some interesting use cases, we tried to design out an improvement that
can help both testers and developers.
Here are a couple of use cases of great interest:
- Testing the new version of an existing module or testing its resources/dependencies:
Sometimes it would be useful to test the integration of a different version of the new
library into wildfly. Let's think about a patched version of hibernate-core or
jgroups. This is supposed to be done without embedding the resource into the application,
but delegating the library management to wildfly, instead.
- Provisioning the static resources for third party libraries dynamically: They asked me
to create a lot of static modules for third party libraries a lot of times. This happens
each time (always) a bunch of applications use the same, shared set of third party
libraries and, of course, each time a developer avoids bundling the libraries inside the
binaries (ear/war). Let's think about apache commons, security libraries, or hadoop
client libraries (see my github:
https://github.com/andreabattaglia/cloudera-eap-modules
<
https://github.com/andreabattaglia/cloudera-eap-modules>, there you can find a huge
set of the static modules for wildfly used to connect to hadoop services without need of
embedding the jars into the applications binaries). This usecase applies to the jdbc
drivers as well.
My aim is to avoid wasting time to create the structure of each static module each time
a developer needs brand new one or a different version of it and to avoid wasting time
googling for an existing solution. Usually, this activity requires to put a lot of effort
in testing the static module as well. Moreover, sometimes , the solution to the same
problem can be found on different sites or blogs in different flavours, which is
misleading most of all for developers who have no experience in the management of static
modules in wildfly.
The idea: share the descriptor of the static module in a place accessible to all the
developers. The tool used to save the descriptor files must be able to version them. Each
time the wildfly deployer is asked for a static module which is not bunlded in the default
package or is not already available locally, the module descriptor and its resource and
dependencies will be built automatically.
The solution design: wildfly is already able to download the components of a static
module from an artifact repository, but this feature strictly relates to the resources.
It would be useful to improve this feature in order to create a static module locally
each time the module is requested by a subsystem or an application being deployed. The
deployer should first check for the local module availability. If the module is not
available locally, wildfly will first search for the module descriptor into the artifact
repository (maven repo implementation), then create folder tree, download resources and
repeat iteratively the algorithm for each dependency found in the module descriptor.
This behaviour will automate the dynamic creation of the static module starting from the
module descriptor.
I'm keen to discuss the proposal with you and to help to design and develop a first
implementation as well.
Thanks a lot in advance for your time,
Andrea
___________________________
Andrea Battaglia
EMEA Middleware Architect
<rh_signature_logo.png>
Red Hat
Via Generale Gustavo Fara, 26
20124 MILANO
www.redhat.com <
http://www.redhat.com/>
mobile: +39 328 1093652
fax: +39 02 6693111
email: andrea.battaglia(a)redhat.com <mailto:andrea.battaglia@redhat.com>
_______________________________________________
wildfly-dev mailing list
wildfly-dev(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/wildfly-dev
--
Jason T. Greene
WildFly Lead / JBoss EAP Platform Architect
JBoss, a division of Red Hat