For wooki, we needed to find an easy way for the user to install wooki and set its production environment properties like database URL or file upload directory. Main objectives are :
- No manual server restart after application configuration
- Easy to install : put the wooki.war in the ‘webapps’ folder, go to the browser, configure and that’s all
- Develop the installation application with Tapestry, no way to use JSP ;)
- Package the installation application with wooki.war
- Allow spring to directly access to the properties set by the user
- Run the installation application with a minimal set of Tapestry Modules to avoid hibernate or spring to load early on startup
Then we have developed this solution in a standalone contribution that you can find on github with full documentation. It has been build with tapestry 5.2.0 because wooki now uses this version of Tapestry (but really requires less effort to move to 5.1.0.5)
The solution has been tested with the current working branch of wooki and we expect to make it evolve to provide facilities for hibernate configuration for exemple. By the way, give it try if you are interested in and do not hesitate to post your comments/suggestions.
