[gentoo-java] Supporting Java web applications in Gentoo

[Krzysiek Pawlik]

Yesterday meeting ended and I started my work on Java webapps in Gentoo -
preliminary results are documented here:

 * my blog: http://blog.simpledesigns.com.pl/2007/11/11/java-webapps-in-gentoo/
 * first version of eclass:
http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/nelchael/browser/eclass/java-webapp.eclass?rev=301
 * current version:
http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/nelchael/browser/eclass/java-webapp.eclass?rev=305

In java-webapps category there are two ebuilds: test - simple, single servlet
application and blojsom - advanced blogging platform.

What that eclass does exactly? It unpacks all WARs and removes jars that are
present on system with symlinks. What that means? If you have webapp foo-1.0.0
that depends on bar-1.0.0 library and security issue is found in bar-1.0.0 after
upgrading to bar-1.0.1 the webapp will still continue to work, only
"user-action" required is a server restart (to load new bar-1.0.1 jar).

That also means that in WAR file there are no duplicate entries for JARs - less
disk space wasted.

Some webapps may build their own JARs, so eclass has support to not warn about
such wars - see usage of WEBAPP_OWNED_JARS in blojsom-3.1.ebuild.

I'm still working on that eclass, so everything you see in there may still
change, my current todo is alos at top of eclass:

# TODO: documentation
# TODO: list of supported servers?

Eclass also warns if user does not have supported server installed (tomcat,
resin for example).

One important thing is that we need more packages for common stuff - Spring,
Struts2, etc (blojsom uses four bundled jars: two are from Spring, commons-email
and textile4j).

-- 
Krzysiek Pawlik   <nelchael at gentoo.org>   key id: 0xBC555551
desktop-misc, x86, java, apache, ppc, vim...