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Warconfig - feedback requested...

« H E python :: linux :: open source :: email
posted 2006.08.04 Fri
I'm working on an open source tool for managing war files called warconfig. We have a need for this at work. I have a pretty detailed write up here. Warconfig is a tool for deploying, upgrading, and rolling back war files on Tomcat (currently only version 5.5 on Gentoo has been tested, though with a little love it should work on Windows and anywhere else that tomcat does. Support for additional app servers should be pretty easy to implement).

The coolest feature, (which is still in the process of being implemented), will allow one to easily see what has changed between war file versions. (Say you have a configuration file containing data specific to your deployment, such as jdbc connection parameters. This will allow you to quickly validate if you've updated your files).

Like the gentoo tools it was based on, it is written in python. This is a quick project and has been developed and tested in the past couple of days (unittests have made my life a lot easier, during various refactorings throughout the week).

So my question to you, lazy web, is what do you think of a tool like this? Is it useful? Overkill? Redundant? How do you manage configuration changes in your J2EE deployments? Please feel free to post your comments below.

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comments (4)


1. Alan Williamson left...
2006.08.04 Fri 2:17 am :: http://alan.blog-city.com/

This is an interesting project, and one I wonder how useful it would really be. I think in its current incarnation, the ability to simply see if there is a difference in the two war files wouldn't be terribly useful. For example would a simple recompilation highlight that the fact the two war's were different?

That said, taking it further and applying the gentoo model, it would be seriously cool that if you did indeed spot there was a difference give the option to do a merge. Although not sure how often you would want to do that!


2. Steve left...
2006.08.04 Fri 1:06 pm

I like this idea a lot. I know that it would be very helpful for quality purposes if you had to track down something that went wrong and if/when it changed. We keep all our old versions around (we basically do symlinks to point to the actual live version), and it would be nice to see exactly what changed between two wars.

It'd be nice to say, ignore JSPs or something ... like

warconfig --xml

to do a diff on the xml files... or

warconfig --properties for properties files.

Steve


3. Matt left...
2006.08.04 Fri 4:18 pm

Alan- I got it so it is now diffing. I need to provide some sort of integration with editors or mergers now.

Steve- Excellent idea, since I envision that property files or xml are most of what you'd what to merge anyway. (One would hope there aren't magic numbers/values hardcoded into those class files)


4. Paul Boddie left...
2006.08.09 Wed 1:59 am

Matt, if you want to start digging around in class files, you might be interested in the classfile module found in the javaclass project: http://www.python.org/pypi/javaclass. The module provides a Python API to access details concerning the methods, attributes, interfaces (and so on) inside Java class files. (The project itself was slightly more ambitious but isn't currently being developed.)