Simplest way to load a custom RequestHandler in Jetty?

[Chris Hostetter <ho...@fucit.org>]

For my Apachecon talk, I've created a few very simple "demo"
RequestHandlers to show off some various functionality ... I started
developing these in my solr SVN tree, so it wasn't untill today that it
occured to me I had no idea what was needed in Jetty to add an arbitrary
jar to the solr.war classpath at runtime.

My goal being to provide:
  * the java source
  * a precompiled jar
  * a solrconfig.xml that registers/refrences these RequestHandlers
  * simple instructions for downloading a nightly build, replacing the
    config, copying the jar to someplace magical, and starting up the
    server.

(For me giving the talk, i could just compile the code right into the
solr.war, or use Resin which I'm more familiar with -- but i was hoping ot
have an easy way that anyone could recreate the my demo using the default
example)

things I've already tried...

  * java -cp .:my.jar -jar start.jar
  * putting my.jar in the example/lib directory
  * putting my.jar in the example/ext directory (this has a differnet
    problem - the jar is loaded before the webapp so it can't resolve
    dependencies like "SolrRequestHandler")
  * modifing the jetty.xml to include something like this...
  <Call name="addWebApplication">
    <Arg>/hoss</Arg>
    <Arg>./webapps/solr.war</Arg>

    <Set name="extractWAR">true</Set>
    <Set name="defaultsDescriptor"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/etc/webdefault.xml</Set>
    <Set name="classLoaderJava2Compliant">false</Set>
    <Call name="addClassPath">
      <Arg><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>my.jar</Arg>
    </Call>
  </Call>

  ...i got that last idea from here, based on the timeline, this fix
should be in the Jetty5.1.11 that we're using, but it doesn't seem to work
for me.


Has anyone out there gotten Jetty to load their custom RequestHandlers,
Analyzers, or Similarities? ... even if you haven't do you have any
suggestions on how to do it cleanly? (ie: without deconstructing the war
and injecting my jar)

-Hoss

Re: Simplest way to load a custom RequestHandler in Jetty?

[Chris Hostetter <ho...@fucit.org>]

: I don't think Jetty supports hot reload (correct me if I'm wrong).

I wasn't even trying to hot reload -- i just wanted a way to specify in
the configs (before i start Jetty) that it should include my extra jar in
the webapps classpath.

: > suggestions on how to do it cleanly? (ie: without deconstructing
: > the war
: > and injecting my jar)
:
: Why not deconstruct the WAR?   Here's how I have my development

don't get me wrong, i certainly can deconstruct/reconstruct the war -- i
was just hoping for something simple that would show off how easy it ease
to use custom request handlers in Solr ... but i'm discovering it's not as
easy as i'm use to with Resin.


-Hoss

Re: Simplest way to load a custom RequestHandler in Jetty?

[Andrew May <am...@ingenta.com>]

Erik Hatcher wrote:
  > Why not deconstruct the WAR?

Alternatively you can just update the WAR directly which is what I'm doing to add in a 
custom TokenFilter I wrote:

<copy file="${lib.dir}/deploy/solr.war" todir="${build.dir}"/>

<war destfile="${build.dir}/solr.war" update="true">
   <lib dir="${build.dir}">
     <include name="icebox-solr.jar"/>
   </lib>
</war>

Here's the Jetty FAQ entry on Hot-Deploy:
http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty5/faq/faq_s_200-General_t_HotDeploy.html

Basically the raw Jetty doesn't have any Hot deployment mechanisms built in, but it does 
hot deploy when embedded in other things (e.g. Jetty, Geronimo).

-Andrew

Re: Simplest way to load a custom RequestHandler in Jetty?

[Erik Hatcher <er...@ehatchersolutions.com>]

On Aug 28, 2006, at 9:25 PM, Chris Hostetter wrote:
> things I've already tried...
>
>   * java -cp .:my.jar -jar start.jar
>   * putting my.jar in the example/lib directory
>   * putting my.jar in the example/ext directory (this has a differnet
>     problem - the jar is loaded before the webapp so it can't resolve
>     dependencies like "SolrRequestHandler")
>   * modifing the jetty.xml to include something like this...
>   <Call name="addWebApplication">
>     <Arg>/hoss</Arg>
>     <Arg>./webapps/solr.war</Arg>
>
>     <Set name="extractWAR">true</Set>
>     <Set name="defaultsDescriptor"><SystemProperty  
> name="jetty.home" default="."/>/etc/webdefault.xml</Set>
>     <Set name="classLoaderJava2Compliant">false</Set>
>     <Call name="addClassPath">
>       <Arg><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>my.jar</Arg>
>     </Call>
>   </Call>
>
>   ...i got that last idea from here, based on the timeline, this fix
> should be in the Jetty5.1.11 that we're using, but it doesn't seem  
> to work
> for me.

I don't think Jetty supports hot reload (correct me if I'm wrong).   
You could pull this off with Tomcat though.  I did that kind of stuff  
for lots of Tapestry talks with Tomcat running and setting my IDE to  
compile classes right into WEB-INF/classes, waiting for the context  
to reload and hitting refresh in the browser.

> Has anyone out there gotten Jetty to load their custom  
> RequestHandlers,
> Analyzers, or Similarities? ... even if you haven't do you have any
> suggestions on how to do it cleanly? (ie: without deconstructing  
> the war
> and injecting my jar)

Why not deconstruct the WAR?   Here's how I have my development  
environment (and production too) set up with a little bit of Ant, and  
solr.war checked into our repository as lib/solr.war.  It only takes  
me a few seconds to go from saving a change to a .java file to being  
up and running in Solr:

   <target name="unwar-solr">
     <unwar src="lib/solr.war" dest="${build.dir}/solr"/>
     <copy file="lib/lucene-similarity-2.1-dev.jar" todir="$ 
{build.dir}/solr/WEB-INF/lib"/>
   </target>

   <target name="compile" depends="unwar-solr">
     <mkdir dir="${build.dir}/classes"/>

     <javac
      srcdir="src/java"
      destdir="${build.dir}/classes"
      debug="on">
       <classpath>
         <path refid="classpath"/>
         <pathelement location="${build.dir}/solr/WEB-INF/lib/lucene- 
core-nightly.jar"/>
       </classpath>
       <compilerarg value="-Xlint:unchecked"/>
     </javac>


     <javac
      srcdir="src/solr"
      destdir="${build.dir}/solr/WEB-INF/classes"
      debug="on">
       <classpath>
         <pathelement location="${build.dir}/solr/WEB-INF/lib/classes"/>
         <pathelement location="${build.dir}/solr/WEB-INF/lib/lucene- 
core-nightly.jar"/>
         <pathelement location="lib/lucene-similarity-2.1-dev.jar"/>
       </classpath>
     </javac>
   </target>

   <target name="dist" depends="compile">
     <mkdir dir="${dist.dir}"/>

     <!-- this is our configuration directory -->
     <copy todir="${dist.dir}/solr">
       <fileset dir="solr"/>
     </copy>

     <!-- copy in the stuff just built -->
     <copy todir="${dist.dir}/solr/webapps/solr">
       <fileset dir="${build.dir}/solr"/>
     </copy>
   </target>