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Open-Source Context

By Allen Holub

January 15, 2005 — (Page 1 of 3)
I’m conflicted about open-source software. I just read yet another alarmist SCO-versus-all-that-is-good-with-theworld magazine article that fretted that the SCO-IBM lawsuit meant the end of open-source software. As I read, I found myself thinking that, even though I use a lot of open-source stuff, the end of open source as we know it might not be such a bad thing.

My most recent experiences with Tomcat demonstrate my dilemma. The newest version of Tomcat was just plain broken. It didn’t load and run custom tags correctly, for example. Though I could (in fact did) go to an earlier version, the fact that Tomcat wasn’t subjected to even rudimentary regression testing is disturbing.

The next issue is one of documentation and developer attitude. I wanted to use a local-configuration-file mechanism that’s pushed heavily in the documentation (context.xml), and I was deploying from the development directory using the Ant build.xml file that’s shipped with Tomcat. This process simply doesn’t work.

I started with the documentation to find a solution. Tomcat’s documentation is virtually unusable, though. It’s a hodgepodge of inadequate .html files. There’s no way to print it. There’s no real organizational principle, index or search mechanism. A lot of the documentation is written by developers for other developers, so it is sketchy at best, and incomprehensible to a new user.

I then subscribed, reluctantly, to the Tomcat-user mailing list. I say “reluctantly” because this is a high-volume list with a lot of noise on it. The answer I got from the list was disturbing. I was told that direct deployment from a development directory was added only because users demanded it.

The developers (I’m reading between the lines) didn’t really want to add the feature. They also didn’t want you to deploy from a directory for philosophical reasons. Consequently, they implemented local-directory deployment badly—in a minimal way. A casualty of this process was context.xml. In order to get that feature to work, I would have to deploy in a jar file. However, jar deployment is a real annoyance when you’re doing test-driven development because it adds time to the very short (5-minute) compile-deploy-test cycle.

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