[Mulgara-general] firefox bug and server config

[Paul Gearon]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 7:44 AM, Gregg Reynolds <dev at mobileink.com> wrote:
>> I'm not sure I follow your complaint here. You may be talking about
>> something I haven't had to configure before (encoding a programming
>> language? You mean, something like an AST of Java in XML?). On the
>> other hand, I've definitely decided that I don't like Java either.
>> :-)
>
> Sorry, looking at Jetty's configuration language made me grumpy.  Unless
> I've misunderstood something, it basically asks the user/admin to learn the
> Jetty Java API in order to code a configuration, by writing Java in XML.
>  It's unbelievable.  Any configuration language that requires me to read
> Java API documentation in order to accomplish a simple task like setting a
> header is not my friend.  (Compare the HTTP Header module of nginx).  I'm
> sure I could figure out how to set the proper Access-Control-Allow-Origin
> header, but it would probably take me a week and it would put me in a really
> bad mood. ;)

There were several headers that I needed to set or change, and could
find documentation on. In the end I ran the system in a debugger and
traced through several requests. A very time consuming task, but I
learnt quite a bit about how Jetty handled requests (much more complex
than I'd have expected for a "simple" HTTP server).

> (I suspect this ghastly design is left over from the (thankfully brief)
> period when absolutely everything, everywhere, just had to be XML.   But
> config language is one area where a Domain-Specific Language is clearly the
> way to go.)

I've seen this sort of thing myself in the past, but I didn't know it
was present in Jetty.

>> That said, it can be hard to find things in documentation at the best
>> of times. I'd love to set it up to make it easy for people to find
>> what they need, but I really don't know how. It's not feasible to just
>> tell people that something is "in the wiki" if they have to read the
>> whole thing before they find what they need.
>
> I've been thinking about that.  Once a sufficient amount of detail is
> accumulated on the wiki it will be time to write some kind of "Definitive
> Guide", organizing it all according to some kind of plan.  The stuff under
> "Draft Documentation" is an admittedly feeble attempt to begin by trying
> various categorizations of stuff.  My instinct is to start by architectural
> "service categories", which is why I was asking about e.g. the details of
> resolvers - wasn't sure how to classify them in terms of service category.

I have a feeling that a lot of info should be duplicated all over the
place, just so people can find it when it's relevant to them.
Unfortunately, doing "redundant" work in something that is already not
getting enough time and effort is probably doomed to failure.  :-)

>>
>> >> > http://bitbucket.org/gar/mulligan/overview/ in case anybody's
>> >> > interested.
>> >>
>>
>> OK. It's just that describing it as competing with the CLI made it
>
> My bad; "it complements the CLI" was how I should have put it.

I'll certainly be interested to see it.

If you need changes to the Jetty config, then just let me know and I'm
happy to make sure they make it into the standard distribution. (The
general rule is that once you've submitted 2 non-trivial successful
patches, then you can have SVN access).


Regards,
Paul