[Mono-devel-list] implicit bootstrap from a zip/gz file?

[Rafael Ferreira]

Rafael, 

I agree with your point that metadata in the jar is kinda redundant once you
have the .net attributes, but as far as just packaging an app for deployment
I think that the ability of running the entire up without explicitly having
to untar the package is really nice. It is nice to know that .net 2.0 will
kinda address the issue, but you still will need 1 .exe and 1.dll file to
deploy an app, it would be nice to abstract that from the end user so they
would only see 1 file and maybe go even further and allow for bootstrapping
compressed files by implicitly decompress the package and then running it. 

And I agree with you the whole jar/war/sar thing is extremely nice in the
webapp arena. 


- rafael 

-----Original Message-----
From: A Rafael D Teixeira [mailto:rafaelteixeirabr at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, May 10, 2004 10:44 AM
To: Rafael.Ferreira at apollogrp.edu
Cc: mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
Subject: RE: [Mono-devel-list] implicit bootstrap from a zip/gz file?

>From: Rafael Ferreira <Rafael.Ferreira at apollogrp.edu>
>
>Hey everyone,

Hi Rafael, and list

>Has anyone thought about adding an implicit tar "de-archive" to mono.exe to
>allow things like:
>
>mono -tar blah.tar.Myclass

I've thought a bit about it, but didn't found much need for such a thing 
generally speaking. But as I had the need to teach about Apache Tomcat 
WebApps (.war files), now I surely apreciate the fact of being able to 
deliver a 'canned' package and just drop it in the right directory for 
deployment.

>So the main() method in myclass gets bootstrapped? YES, this is the same as
>java jar files...

Common .jar files that are just packaged classes and resources, doesn't add 
much to what we have in the CLI assemblies format. Also lots of meta-data 
can be added to them through .NET Attributes, that do part of what the 
war/ear strutured archives formats achieve.

>I understand that you can add resource files to a dll/exe but I'm not sure
>it that allows for a single dll to contain everything an application needs.
>This would be extra nice for web applications where you can bundle up all
>aspx/dll/png files.

Well, in the upcoming ASP.NET 2.0, they are inserting in the pipeline an 
resource extractor so that things like bitmaps can reside in the assembly 
and will be automatically extracted with the right url(for the benefit of 
img tags or image controls, for example). And yes pages can get precompiled 
and have the source omitted from distribution, also. But I don't see the 
problem in having a two-stage install-step (copy tar.gz to parent directory 
and unpack), anyway in addition one will need to configure the virtual 
directory/application information in the web server...

This whole "drop packed-file and run" experience in truth seems more 
appropriate to reside in the web server/web engine/application server as it 
happens with Tomcat/JBoss...

>  - Rafael

Best regards,


Rafael "Monoman" Teixeira
Mono Hacker since 16 Jul 2001 - http://www.go-mono.org/
MonoBrasil Founding Member - Membro Fundador do MonoBrasil 
http://monobrasil.softwarelivre.org
English Blog: http://monoblog.blogspot.com/
Brazilian Portuguese Blog: http://monoblog.weblogger.terra.com.br/

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