It all started innocently enough, TAPESTRY-1287: Tapestry does not deploy properly under JBoss 4.0. Just a simple security or configuration problem, no biggie I thought.
Turns out, its not JBoss at all, it's Tomcat 5.5.20.
Tapestry 5 relies on a feature of class loaders: If you invoke ClassLoader.getResources() with a folder path, it returns the URLs of the folders. Sometimes this URL is for a file on the filesystem, and if you open the connection you get a series of lines identifying the files and sub-folders. Other times, the URL is for a JAR and you get a JARURLConnection and ultimately a JarFile instance.
Tapestry uses this information to scan the classpath, including the WAR, for all page and component classes. This is the key part of the case insensitivity feature.
This works great under Jetty and I didn't give it a second thought until this bug popped up.
Alas, Tomcat works very differently. It partially explodes the WAR on deployment, but doesn't extract the classes to WEB-INF/classes. It also doesn't do what Jetty and the JVM's ClassLoaders do, in terms of responding sensibly to folder paths (as discussed above).
That leaves Tapestry 5 out in the cold, because it can't locate any of the web application's pages, either via the supported approach, ServletContext.getResourcePaths(), or via the ClassLoader approach (which is not documented but completely reasonable).
Tapestry isn't the first one to hit the kind of problem; a recent JBoss bug, JBAS-2676 shows that the Facelets crew hit a similar problem, and I've added Bug 41664 to ASF's Bugzilla to see if I can get a response.
So, I'm starting to dig around, to see if there's any magic I can use to kludge together a workaround. I've been hunting around in the debugger, trying to find some object that has a reference to the original WAR, which I could open up and read, just to scan WEB-INF/classes.
If that doesn't come together soon, I'll need a different approach, such as a Maven task to locate the classes and add some kind of index file to the WAR that can be used at runtime. I've really been trying to avoid doing anything that requires anything special during build and deploy, I want everything to just work ... and Tomcat is letting me down!
Sorry Howard. It isn't Tomcat letting you down, it is Java.
ReplyDeleteJava very clearly doesn't support exploration of the package/class namespace. java.lang.Package has no tree-walking tools. java.lang.Class has nothing about the underlying .class file. There is nothing that requires .class files to be distinct filesystem resources at all. You could easily write a class loader on top of blobs in a database.
I wish that there were such an API and custom loaders just threw UnsupportedOperationException when the underlying fabric (e.g. remote codebases) failed to support it. But there isn't.
If I ever write one, I'll send it along.