RHQ usage of SEAM and AS7 integration

John Mazzitelli mazz at redhat.com
Tue Aug 28 19:22:45 UTC 2012


OK, after looking at this, it appears the first major stumbling block for the AS7 work is our usage of SEAM and how we can run in AS7.

Here's the issue - it appears we are using an older version of SEAM that does not work on AS7. We simply can't use the SEAM we were using. This is not surprising at all (see example threads of similar issues we have or will have: https://community.jboss.org/message/608573#608573 - https://community.jboss.org/blogs/marek-novotny/2011/12/16/dvdstore-migration-for-jboss-as-710beta#comment-8622 ).

What I think we need to consider is one of the following:

a) rip out SEAM entirely and all code in RHQ using it/depending on it (this includes mainly core/gui and enterprise/gui/portal-war modules but also this content_http thing that i dont think we need/should have/is used)

or

b) refactor our GUI code (portal war) to either not use SEAM or to make use of a newer SEAM that can be deployed inside of AS7

Now - if we do b) it means there will be a lot of effort wasted for very little gain. Most of portal-war isn't even used anymore - our GWT UI handles the vast majority of UI features now. So if we do b) its merely work that isn't even going to be used - it will be just so we can successfully deploy the RHQ ear only to later rip out portal war at some point anyway. Now, I can't say how much effort it will take to do b), but clearly, the new SEAM isn't backward compatible with the old - I'm seeing missing classes and things like that at startup. We'd have to integrate with the latest SEAM libraries and all that would entail (e.g. refactoring code perhaps)

But we can't blindly do a) either - all of portal-war is not obsolete - there still are small portions still used (graphing and the content UI are the two main areas that I know still use portal-war - there is also that old content_http servlet thing).  Graphing pages, IIRC, are actually still on the old struts stuff - so I'm not even sure if JSF is even used, let alone SEAM. We'd have to investigate that. The content UI I think does use code that relies on SEAM. So ripping out portal-war isn't going to be like ripping off a band-aid - it will still require some delicate maneuvering.

The third option I would like to discuss is porting the rest of portal-war to GWT. Rather than waste time doing b), I think we can take that time and do more useful things that have to get done anyway - that is, port over the final pages in portal war to GWT. Thus, when we do that, I think we can do a) more quickly and without worrying about doing too much damage. The only thing that I think we'd have to look out for are simple things like StartupServlet (which we can easily port into a startup servlet in the GWT app or make a singleton EJB, which is new in EJB 3.1 and is now supported because we'd be on AS7)

Thoughts?


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