[wildfly-dev] Managed exploded deployments

Emmanuel Hugonnet has been working on a long requested feature to have WildFly support "managed exploded deployments." We have a requirements analysis doc for this at https://developer.jboss.org/docs/DOC-55497 and I just wanted to point that out to the list so anyone interested can have a look, and comment on this thread or on the document. A managed deployment is one where the user provided content is copied by the server/host controller into its internal content repo and then thereafter that copy is what is used. I estimate that 99%+ of all zipped deployments in WildFly are managed. With an unmanaged deployment the user provides the server with the local FS path to the content and then the server directly uses that content. All exploded deployments are unmanaged, as we don't support managed yet. We propose to add 5 new operations to the deployment resource: explode (to convert and archive deployment to exploded) add-content update-content remove-content read-content There is one "nice-to-have" requirement listed on the doc where I'm increasingly thinking it needs to be a hard requirement, so thought on this are appreciated: "The explode operation can take an optional path parameter, the value of which is a path within the deployment that should be exploded. * The use case for this is scenarios like an exploded ear that contains an unexploded war, and then the user later wishes the war to be exploded. * This is much closer to a hard requirement if the nice-to-have requirement for recursively exploding is not supported. * This operation will fail if the content referred to by the path parameter is already exploded or is not a zip file. * This operation will fail if any content between the root of the deployment and the content referred to by the path parameter is an unexploded archive. * So, /deployment=foo.ear:explode(path=/thewar.war/WEB-INF/lib/thejar.jar) would fail if thewar.war hadn't previously been exploded." -- Brian Stansberry Senior Principal Software Engineer JBoss by Red Hat