[Dev] BIRT: Update

[Brett Wooldridge]

I've been banging my head against BIRT for several days now.  I think I know the approach I have to take now.

The BIRT WAR:

My initial approach has been to try to deploy the BIRT WAR file using the PAX War deployer.  Even reporting and waiting for fixes from the PAX guys that was blocking the deployment early in the process.  But we're past that now.  However, the BIRT WAR makes the assumption that it is running in a standalone Tomcat or Jetty installation.  The BIRT WAR tries to run an Equinox OSGi instance within the web container.  It of course is assuming that there is no OSGi container already running - in a standalone web container there wouldn't be.  However, because we are already running within an Equinox container this creates havoc when BIRT tries to start another one inside of our Web Container which is already inside of an Equinox container.

I have essentially abandoned trying to get the WAR to run within our container.  I just can't see how it can be made to work.  Although advice or suggestions are welcome.

The Gross Alternative:

Because BIRT is essentially already a giant (and I do mean giant) collection of OSGi plugins, these plugins are directly deployable within our own Equinox container.  To this end I have created a crate file for BIRT, and not surprisingly it installs without problem.  The server comes up without any freak-outs, but I'm not starting any of the BIRT bundles yet.

However, the Servlets that we want to deploy from BIRT are the same characters that assume they should start the OSGi framework.  So, I am going to have to copy and modify the BIRT Servlets to suit our own deployment scenario.  This is the truly gross part.  For this reason I am revising my original estimate of 80 hours upward to 120 hours.  The silver lining is I'm probably 50% of the way there at this point.  But there have already been surprises, so I won't be too shocked if we encounter others.

So, that's where BIRT stands as I write this.

-Brett
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ziptie.org/pipermail/dev/attachments/20080302/e59c7388/attachment.html