start.options Re: [jetty-dev] Re: jetty7 distribution

[Greg Wilkins <gregw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

I'm wondering if we could do some more minor improvements with the way that
start.jar and the structure of lib work together.


Currently we have lib/ext which is always on the classpath, so jetty-hightide
now is adding

  lib/ext/atomikos
  lib/ext/derby

But we really don't want those ALWAYs on the classpath.

We could move them to

  lib/atomikos
  lib/derby

but then we would need to have entries in start.config for all such
possibilities... which would need good foresight.


So instead, I'm wondering if we should update start.jar mechanism
with a way to discover options.  So if lib/jsp, lib/jta, lib/jndi
directories existed, then adding

[All,=$(jetty.home)/lib/*]

to the start.config file would be equivalent to adding

[All,jsp]
$(jetty.home)/lib/jsp/**

[All,jta]
$(jetty.home)/lib/jta/**

[All,jndi]
$(jetty.home)/lib/jndi/**



More over,  I'd like to make the default options configurable from a file,
so that for the jetty-hightide distribution all the jndi, jaas examples
webapps would work out-of-the-box, but without hard coding their dependencies
into the default options list.

I think start.jar should check for a start.default file (in current directory
or passed in via option), that would contain a default command line to
execute.  So for hightide, it might be something like:

OPTIONS=Server,jmx,jsp,jta \
${jetty.home}/etc/jetty-jmx.xml \
${jetty.home}/etc/jetty.xml
${jetty.home}/etc/jetty-ssl.xml


Joakim - you were working on something like this right?

thoughts????