Windows installer musings

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/22/14, 12:45 PM, "Rod Widdowson" <rdw at steadingsoftware.com> wrote:
>
>The war directory worries me slightly because that is where jsp files goes
>and we need to have a plan about that.  Might we actually put the jsp file
>(and anything else which needs to go into the war) somewhere else
>(war-template?) and let the installer overwrite to war contents?  We could
>then use the same technique to allow people to over-write web.xml.  This
>is
>not unlike what we hacked into V2 to preserve web.xml

Yes, this is what I've been advocating, which is the Atlassian model. They
create a pristine war tree and an overlay in edit-webapp that gets copied
into the tree and used to create the packed war.

You may want to grab a copy of confluence and just see how that looks.

>There is also the issue about war creation for those who are unable by
>choice of container to use an exploded war.

I'm not sure such a thing exists, but in any case, I believe we should
follow the Atlassian model and build a packed war and copy it to a
specific location, and then we can decide separately whether our default
context fragment would unpack or not. For Windows, I would suggest not,
for simplicity and because Windows tends to correlate to "not very Java
experienced" because Java is just bad on Windows and if you use it
heavily, you ain't using Windows.

-- Scott