P4
Name: rmT116609 Date: 09/02/2004
A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
The Preferences API has much to recommend it over the use of property files or deployment descriptiors. However, its usefullness is limited by the lack of supporting tools. Preferences can be set or modified only through a Java program, whereas property files and deployment descriptors can be edited manually.
It would be very helpfull if you culd provide a "preferencestool" with the JDK, similar to the policytool. Such a tool would provide a GUI to set preferences and would also have an option to import and export to the preferences XML format.
Another problem is that there is no easy way to migrate preferences from one machine to another. Enterprise applications typically migrate from development to test to production environments. It is easy to migrate parameters specified in property files and deployment descriptors. The are merely included as part of the jar, war, or ear and deployed on the taget machine. There is no similarly easy way to migrate preferences. There are several possible approaches to solve this. Perhaps preferences could be exported tothe current XML format and included in the archive in some standardized way. The application server would recognize this when the archive is deployed and set the preferences on the target machine. While it would not be difficult to solve this problem with, say, a ServletContextListener, it would be great if there were a standardized approach.
JUSTIFICATION :
It is too difficult to set or migrate preferences.
(Incident Review ID: 301078)
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###@###.### 11/3/04 20:43 GMT
A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
The Preferences API has much to recommend it over the use of property files or deployment descriptiors. However, its usefullness is limited by the lack of supporting tools. Preferences can be set or modified only through a Java program, whereas property files and deployment descriptors can be edited manually.
It would be very helpfull if you culd provide a "preferencestool" with the JDK, similar to the policytool. Such a tool would provide a GUI to set preferences and would also have an option to import and export to the preferences XML format.
Another problem is that there is no easy way to migrate preferences from one machine to another. Enterprise applications typically migrate from development to test to production environments. It is easy to migrate parameters specified in property files and deployment descriptors. The are merely included as part of the jar, war, or ear and deployed on the taget machine. There is no similarly easy way to migrate preferences. There are several possible approaches to solve this. Perhaps preferences could be exported tothe current XML format and included in the archive in some standardized way. The application server would recognize this when the archive is deployed and set the preferences on the target machine. While it would not be difficult to solve this problem with, say, a ServletContextListener, it would be great if there were a standardized approach.
JUSTIFICATION :
It is too difficult to set or migrate preferences.
(Incident Review ID: 301078)
======================================================================
###@###.### 11/3/04 20:43 GMT