[jetty-dev] http service configuration

[Jesse McConnell <jesse.mcconnell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Simon,

Not sure if your on the jetty-dev eclipse list or not yet so mailing
both you and the list.

Anyway, I have looked over the http service and have it updated to the
7.0.0.M0 artifacts of jetty7.  Took a little detour and have a jetty7
update site wired up now so I can get a feel for your eclipse oriented
way to declaring and using dependencies....takes a bit of getting used
too over maven. :)

I took a bit of free time today and wanted to bring up the
customization mechanism currently being used for this httpservice and
hopefully you can educate me a bit on if this is the established osgi
way of configuring things.  It obviously works, but it seems awfully
inflexible compared to the xml configuration mechanism that jetty
currently has wired in.

As I understand the current workings, it is _basically_ a fluffed up
way of using a .properties type format for declaring specific
configuration options to jetty and the httpservice.  I don't see where
we would be able to do anything like configure handlers or filters,
much less declare multiple contexts and servlets in a single jetty
instance given this osgi service.

A quick way to support this sort of configuration would be to allow
the httpservice to understand the xml format for configuration that
jetty uses, which could easily do all of the server initialization,
contexts, handlers, etc etc.  But something tells me that might not be
the most popular option if this is the preferred medium for osgi
configuration.  There are some performance improvements we could also
add in (using the SslSelectChannelConnector and other nio goop when
appropriate).  There are a ton of features we could add to this thing
to make it much more friendly to use.  Stealing options from the maven
plugin could be nice as well, monitoring directories for changes and
reloading the bits that could be reloaded for hot deploy...lots of
things.  Handly all things I would want to put into a jetty plugin
making use of these functionalities.

The shortest path to an incredibly increasing functionality for this
would be maybe put a key in the Dictionary being used that pointed to
an Object that encapsulated the xml we normally use for jetty startup
(jetty.xml)...a url resource, or something that gives us access to the
xml and then we could just bootstrap up the server from there.  Is
this something that you think is reasonable for this service?

thoughts and comments are welcome...maybe even just dumping out on the
list the things that you hear bemoaned most commonly regarding the
httpservice....and anyone is welcome to chime in on this.

cheers!
jesse


--
jesse mcconnell
jesse.mcconnell@xxxxxxxxx