Details
-
Improvement
-
Status: Closed
-
Major
-
Resolution: Fixed
-
Launchpad Webapp 3
-
None
Description
Currently the Sling Web Application (launchpad/webapp) has one serious drawback: Unless you unpack the war file and configure the sling.home init-parameter, the Sling Web Application can only be deployed once into a single servlet container. The reason for this is, that the default value assumed by the Sling class is the "sling" folder in the current working directory.
To fix this issue, I propose to enhance the SlingServlet which bridges the Servlet container, in which the Sling Web Application is deployed, to the SlingMainServlet in the sling/engine bundle as follows:
- add a new method to the SlingServlet :
protected String getSlingHome(ServletRequest request)
The getSlingHome first checks whether the sling.home init-param is set in the servlet configuration. Next it checks the sling.home init-param of the servlet context. Next if checks calls the ServletContext.getContextPath() method. This call may fail since the method is only defined in Servlet API 2.5. If getContextPatch is not supported in the servlet container and request is not null, the request.getContextPath() method is called to retreived the context paht. If the context path can be retrieved it is converted into the path used as sling.home by just replacing all "/" by "_", thus the context path
"/sling" would become "_sling. Otherwise (if no init-param is set, ServletContext.getContextPath is not supported and request is null), getSlingHome returns null.
- SlingServlet.init() is modified to call getSlingHome(null) and only continue with Sling startup if the value returned is not null. If getSlingHome() returns null, the SlingServlet.init() method does not initialize Sling.
- SlingServlet.service() is enhanced to check whether the init() method started Sling. If not, it calls getSlingHome() with the current request
object and starts Sling. This may take some time, so the SlingServlet.service method sends back a quick response telling the caller, that Sling is about to start. As soon as Sling has started up the request will be processed.
This mechanism should allow the same Sling Web Application war file to be deployed multiple times in the same servlet container and should also
account for Servlet API 2.4 containers, which do not support the ServletContext.getContextPath() method yet.